Suicide
I can now truly understand why some depressed people consider suicide. I mean, I always knew, but you can know something without understanding it.
Imagine you have a pain. The pain has no physical aspect, but it hurts nonetheless. You can't rub it, you can't put a band-aid on it. It is a chronic pain, something you feel every day of your life. It varies in intensity. On a good day you hardly know it's there, and on a bad day its all you can do to get out of bed. Some days you'll be fine and then it hits you out of the blue. Medication may or may not work. Therapy may or may not work.
Now imagine you've lived with this pain all your life, 20, 30, 40 years or more. All that time, and its never gotten better. You might try alternative methods to deal with it, smoking, alcohol, drugs, food. It might work for you at first, but it doesn't last, and can lead to other problems, making the pain worse. You put on a happy face for the world so no one can see how miserable you feel. You start to feel ashamed, because you don't know why you have this pain, you don't know what's causing it, you don't know how to get rid of it. Other people don't understand, they tell you chin up, things will get better. They think you're just going through a rough patch, only the rough patch has been your entire life.
You finally come to a breaking point. It doesn't matter how successful you are, or how many people love you, you just want the pain GONE. Nothing else matters.
The pain is depression. You can't show it to anyone, so they can see how bad it is. They can only see your actions, which are often misinterpreted as laziness, irresponsibility, or just introvertedness.
So you start to consider suicide. People say it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but when you think about it, life is temporary too. You're not going to live forever, no one is. And at this point you'd rather feel nothing than to keep hurting.
In this analogy, I use the word you, when I really mean me, for the most part. This my pain, this is how I feel. And while I am not actively considering suicide, I can understand why people do. I can feel their pain.
Imagine you have a pain. The pain has no physical aspect, but it hurts nonetheless. You can't rub it, you can't put a band-aid on it. It is a chronic pain, something you feel every day of your life. It varies in intensity. On a good day you hardly know it's there, and on a bad day its all you can do to get out of bed. Some days you'll be fine and then it hits you out of the blue. Medication may or may not work. Therapy may or may not work.
Now imagine you've lived with this pain all your life, 20, 30, 40 years or more. All that time, and its never gotten better. You might try alternative methods to deal with it, smoking, alcohol, drugs, food. It might work for you at first, but it doesn't last, and can lead to other problems, making the pain worse. You put on a happy face for the world so no one can see how miserable you feel. You start to feel ashamed, because you don't know why you have this pain, you don't know what's causing it, you don't know how to get rid of it. Other people don't understand, they tell you chin up, things will get better. They think you're just going through a rough patch, only the rough patch has been your entire life.
You finally come to a breaking point. It doesn't matter how successful you are, or how many people love you, you just want the pain GONE. Nothing else matters.
The pain is depression. You can't show it to anyone, so they can see how bad it is. They can only see your actions, which are often misinterpreted as laziness, irresponsibility, or just introvertedness.
So you start to consider suicide. People say it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but when you think about it, life is temporary too. You're not going to live forever, no one is. And at this point you'd rather feel nothing than to keep hurting.
In this analogy, I use the word you, when I really mean me, for the most part. This my pain, this is how I feel. And while I am not actively considering suicide, I can understand why people do. I can feel their pain.
posted by Tom at 10:31 AM
1 Comments:
You are loved.
You can feel better.
There are ways to improve your mental health.
Writing, dialog, cognitive behavior therapy, peer2peer support, even professionals... These are all things that can help.
But it hurts, and it's not easy, but if you do the work you will get there... And it sounds easy "just do the work" but it's not, it takes being brave, it takes facing your inner negative self talk, it takes facing that your life didn't quite go the way you thought it would when you were younger, it takes a lot...
But feeling like you do and being stuck with your mental health the way it is is also difficult, and takes a lot out of you.
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