Despite supposedly being ‘high risk,’ you are left in the dark, ignored until you bring yourself to the surface again. Only then do people shake their heads, silently tutting at the mild inconvenience you are causing by taking up a hospital bed. Only then do the crisis team raise their heads, ask a few obligatory questions before deeming you sane enough to carry on suffering or unstable enough to require their input. This input being a phone call every now and again, perhaps a home visit if you are lucky.
There are no flowers or Get Well Soon cards. Everyone is tired of hearing it by now. How long has it been? Why aren’t you better yet? Your life isn’t that bad, what have you got to be depressed about? People like to search for reasons, find an answer to unanswerable questions. And then, when you finally go through with it: a ripple of shock. A tragedy, a waste. Nobody wants to hear it when you are alive, yet suddenly everyone has something to say when you are gone.
Depression is all-consuming: it drags you to the lowest place you ever thought imaginable and then tries to haul you even lower. It convinces you that you are damaged, alone, unworthy. It makes you elevate death because living seems unfathomable. It tells you that everyone would be better off without you. It brands you a burden, a disappointment, a waste of space. It severs everything you were once interested in, isolates you until loneliness is your only familiarity. It tells you to hurt yourself because nothing can be worse than the mental torment you currently feel. It makes a blade feel like comfort, pills feel like safety.
Imagine waking up on the darkest of days. You haven’t slept properly in weeks. You have fallen behind with trivial tasks: an overflowing inbox, letters that need posting, a house that needs cleaning. But you have also fallen behind on more important things: bills that need paying, a fridge that needs filling, family that need contacting. You know these things need doing, and yet you can’t bring yourself to do any of them. You ask yourself, what’s the point? What’s the point in any of it? What use is a tidy inbox and a full fridge when you don’t plan on being around long enough to utilise it? When every day is dark, when every thought is occupied by the sheer insignificance of daily functions, it becomes easy to fall. And to fall hard.
So what is the answer? A fuck load of physiotherapy and a bouquet of sunflowers? If only it was that easy. The truth: there is no magic cure. Medication can be hugely beneficial for some and completely ineffective for others. Therapy, if accessible, can be that light bulb moment and facilitate a slow but significant recovery. It can also churn over a lot of previous trauma and make things worse before they get better. Talking is pivotal, patience is vital.
Being told that killing yourself would be selfish, that people have it worse than you, only seeks to validate your complete lack of self-worth. It only enforces that you are a horrible/unworthy/evil person that is making a mountain of a molehill, and you should just get on with living because people are out there dying/grieving/suffering/all of the above. Even worse, if you are exasperating your situation with self-destructive behaviours, then you must be, of course, to blame. Drinking with depression? Starving yourself with a history of disordered eating? Overdosing but not taking enough pills to kill you? A cry for help or merely attention-seeking?
Perhaps there is another answer. How about the consideration of drinking to drown out impulsive urges? Skipping meals because you have no motivation to cook for yourself? Overdosing because, in that moment, you want to kill your thoughts momentarily. You want out, you want oblivion. But you are also highly aware of the repercussions. The effect your actions would have on people if you were to succeed. Far from selfish, those who are suicidal often consider their actions the most. Churning over and over how life would be for those left behind. Churning over and over how life would be if you were to continue living.
There is no easy answer. There is no six-week cure. There are only brighter days, moments of Better. To hold on to the hope that things have not been like this forever. One of my favourite quotes is by Matt Haig, a reminder that this state of feeling is temporary. A reminder that you are More:
“Depression is also smaller than you. Always, it is smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you, you do not operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky but - if that is the metaphor - you are the sky. You were there before it. And the cloud can't exist without the sky, but the sky can exist without the cloud.”
