Depression & Suicide

 I put off reading The Mystery of Suicide by Tim Miller and published on The Bulwark for reasons that ought to be apparent to anyone knowing me. Reading it, I feel foolish in not passing it along sooner.

Atypical depression is familiar, at times even cozy. It’s the days you can’t quite bring yourself to get out of bed. The sinking feeling in your stomach. The Sunday scaries. Gorging on ice cream straight from the tub. Laying in the fetal position next to the fire, trying in vain to warm your core. The words and the feelings and signposts are graspable for any human being with the most modest EQ. It even has its own color: the deepest blue.

Situational depression is brutal but comprehensible. It results from the disastrous life choice that catches up or the bad luck that is thrust upon you. Having to face a spouse and kids whose world is about to change after an investment goes belly up or a paramour is revealed. Dread over going into the office after you showed your ass at the holiday party. A lifetime walk of shame for submarining regular people’s savings with your pilfering. Crippling postpartum ennui. Lovesickness. Coping with the loss of a family member to an act of God or man.

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But the reality is certain types of depression exist on a plane that’s entirely different from the one we inhabit. They are all-consuming, chronic, and irrational. A thief that robs at random. An intrusive image, a deathwish that floods your mind without warning. It is not sated by the covers or the comfort food. It persists, even when it lies dormant. It is so inexpiable that it can lead someone with boundless talent, widely admired, to do something unthinkable just to make it stop.

Depression breeds irrationality until the irrational seems, feels, like rationality.  

More, with the first paragraph cutting close to home and the last why I decided to mouth off on the subject, again:

Reflecting on this part of his life is what most makes me wish I could hug him, and it’s also what most makes me want to scream. Because if all you know about depression is the manageable atypical kind or the weatherable situational kind, then it just makes no goddamn sense that someone who loved their kids that fully, that openly, could do something like this to them. 

It might seem ill-mannered to say it so plainly, to them, but how can we achieve anything remotely close to understanding or learn how we might help others dealing with the same trauma without staring straight at the reality of it all? Without accepting that others in our lives, people who also seem to have so much tenderness to give, might be suffering in the same fashion?

Mr. Miller refers to David Hume's essay on suicide, one that I referred to in The World's Longest Suicide Note (Part 3) 5/3/2010, and then proceeds to:

“Equally miserable as if he had been loaded with the most grievous misfortune” is a notion that pulls suicidal depression down from that unknowable, incomprehensible plane and puts it back into our continuum. While it may still be different in kind or cause from more familiar kinds of depression, it gives rise to a mindset that is not actually all that different from that of a person whose depression was thrust upon them by tragedy, because as far as the afflicted is concerned, they are experiencing tragedy. Put another way, suicidal depression tricks the mind into thinking that the type of pain caused by their death already exists in life. Or as David Foster Wallace wrote of people who leapt to their deaths from the burning World Trade Center towers: “When the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors.”

It was Hume who made me realize how the depression had warped my thinking. I still worry that I am fooling myself, that despondency is about to tap me on the shoulder. I have enough control to not want that tap. It may be to my benefit that I ruined my life.

Also avoided was this article from Psychology Today, 6 Signs You’re Depressed and Ignoring It, and those signs are:

1. You feel disconnected from what is important to you. You have people, ideas, and activities that make your life rich and meaningful, but you struggle to focus on these important areas because of the pressures of life that keep getting in your way. When you lose sight of your values, sense of purpose, and direction in life, it's normal to experience some level of distress. Unfortunately, our distress begins to grab our attention, making it even hard to focus on what’s important.
2. There is a gap between what you want and what you have, or between who you are and who you want to be. There is nothing wrong with having this kind of gap. In general, it motivates us to grow and change. But this gap can also be distressing; our unhelpful mind can tell us we are stuck, that life will not change, and that the barriers we face are all our fault.
3. You always treat your thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations as true, valid, and important. When you are distressed, your mind will try to explain what is happening. Far too often, you listen to your mind’s explanation as if it is true and never question its conclusion. For example, your mind might tell you that life should treat you fairly, and because it doesn’t, you should feel miserable and that your misery is all your fault. While this might sound like a reasonable explanation of why you are upset, it is definitely not helpful.
4. You avoid and control your distress. Once your noisy, unhelpful mind is active, your distress is amplified. We naturally want to avoid this kind of distress. Each person has their unique way of avoiding and controlling distress, but the typical methods include the following: a) arguing with your unhelpful mind, trying to convince yourselves with positive thinking; b) distracting yourselves with entertainment and mindless activities like shopping, gaming, or gambling; c) soothing yourself with substances like food, alcohol, drugs, medications, or tobacco; d) opting out of doing things and going places; or e) engaging in self-harm.
5. You are stuck in the "struggle cycle," finding short-term relief only to feel worse once the relief has passed. You avoid and control your distress because it works. Netflix, sex, alcohol, and cheesecake could help you feel less bad in the moment, but that's about as far as their positive effects extend. As soon as the positive state brought about by your avoidance and control strategies wears off, you’re back to feeling miserable again, but with new additional problems. Usually, the things we do to avoid and control our distress will make our life worse in the long run. They cost us time, money, and our health. And these problems will eventually cost us our relationships.
6. You believe you must get rid of your distress before moving forward again. We assume that happiness is a normal, ongoing state of life and that something is wrong with us if we are not happy. We also assume that we should be able to control our thoughts and feelings and that we must get rid of them before moving forward. It is this mindset that keeps the "struggle cycle" spinning. We try to control and avoid our thoughts and feelings in ways that only make things worse, not better.

I read those six paragraphs and recognized myself from the days prior to my arrest. I will keep saying this, just because you think you have your depression under control without professional help, you have nothing under control. That is the voice of experience speaking. 

Another article on which I procrastinated was Understanding work depression:

The initial step to dealing with depression in the workplace is acknowledging it. Accept and recognise how you are feeling. What could be triggering your depression? Is your gloominess related to work? Or is something else causing it? It is essential to get to the source of your state.

Without treatment, it is unlikely that depression will go away on its own. It is essential to find a trustworthy expert you feel comfortable confiding in.

The article covers much on the subject, it should be read, I excerpted what I thought is necessary to make my point about treatment. 

Do not feel alone, do not feel worthless, if you feel depressed. Get help.

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