So let’s talk about suicide. Other people’s, that is.
It’s been on my mind lately because I have been reading books by H. Beam Piper, a science fiction writer from the Fifties and Sixties who many consider to have been just as good as Asimov and Heinlein but who died before reaching their status.
And he died by his own hand. Suicide. He falsely believed his career to be over and faced enormous debts and these two factors drove him into a deep despair from which suicide seemed like the only possible relief.
I know what that’s like. To feel like suicide is the only way to escape your pain. To have that evil voice whispering in your ear, like the Serpent of Eden, telling you how all it would take is one powerful, decisive act, and your pain would be gone forever and the world will be a better place without you, and that nobody would even care.
Dark stuff, I know.
But I never attempted suicide. I made is through the valley of self-inflicted death and I haven’t been suicidal for a long long time.
And part of what keeps me out of that worst of states of mind is that I could never do something so horrible to those who care about me.
Suicide is an act of brutal violence that hurts everyone in the person’s life in a way that nothing else can. Having someone taken from your life by violence is bad enough, but to have it be at their own hand brings things to a whole new level.
Everyone whose lives you touched will feel like someone just ripped their arm off. And it wasn’t some random stranger, it was someone they loved. Someone whom they cared about and now wish they could comfort and protect after the fact.
Because from now on, they will wonder what they could (or should) have done to keep it from happening. Sadly, the answer is usually “nothing”. Depression is extremely resistant to external pressures because it is fundamentally a question of brain chemistry and it’s hard to change that with words.
It’s a battle that due to its very nature must be fought alone.
That doesn’t mean that people should not try to help us depressed types. We need all the help we can get, even if we don’t always appreciate it and often fight the very aid we asked for so pathetically.
Small kindnesses and gentle, supportive actions all help. We remember these things and they can be a great comfort when we are feeling like nobody cares about us and the world is a black and broken place filled with nothing but a long slide down the razor blade of life into the final peace of oblivion.
We need every bit of help fighting back the madness we can get. Fighting your own brain chemistry and remembering that life is not how it feels is extemely hard to do and we need people who shine a light into our lives.
But there is no guarantee that it will keep us from killing ourselves.
Sad but true.
Part of what makes suicide such a terrible act of violence against all who know you is that depression itself is so incomprehensible to normal people, let alone why it would drive someone to do the most incomprehensible act imaginable.
And I have often tried to imagine how depression looks from the outside. It is not a pretty picture. It mjust seem to others like someone their either do bnot understand at all or something they understand enough to not want to know any more.
They fear, not without cause, that if they really understood depression, it would claim them as well.
There are things most people should not think about too much.
I try to keep this truth in mind when I read about some of the highly insensitive things people say to us depressed type people. It is not their fault that they simply do not get it. Most people cannot.
After all, fish don’t know they’re wet. To suffer from depression is to lack something most people don’t even know they have, let alone that it could go missing.
One could describe said missing factor in a lot of different ways, but to me, it fundamentally comes down to a lack of connection to humanity.
The numbness of depression cuts suffers like myself off from the rest of hujmanity. We don’t feel the presence of others, or if we do, it’s as though from very far away.
That’s very bad for a social species like humanity. We naked apes need to feel like we are part of a tribe of other naked apes or we end up feeling like we must be very bad apes who are isolated because of something we have done.
Or worse, because of something we are.
It comes down to something as simple as punishment and reward. Depression’s deadly anesthetic drastically reduces our ability to find anything rewarding. Without rewards, and with the punishment of all the negative emotions of depression, we do not get any of our behaviours reinforced and thus we have no input as to what will make us feel better. We end up slaves to the few things that hit the reward center of our brains so incredibly hard that even our benumbed minds can feel it.
Like junk food. OIr liquor. Or drugs. Or pretty much anything else that feels good. We end up abusing these things because they are seem like they are our only route to anything even approaching happiness.
The real cure would be to reduce the numbness. Perhaps that’s all that antidepressants really do. But we all know that the real cure is to resolve the traumae that are the reason the mind puts out all this numbness in the first place.
And that’s not easy and it takes a lot of time and it means you are going to have to think about the very things you least want to think about in the whole wide world.
But it’s the only road out of this stinkin’ town.
And I aim to take it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.