At the start of my sophomore year of college, I had to sit down with a friend and tell him that his ex-girlfriend was not only never going to date him again, but she was leaving school to get away from him. She had tipped me off that he was severely depressed and suicidal and had been emotionally abusing her as a way of coping. We talked for six hours.
It was the hardest conversation I have ever had.
I’ve had depression since I was 7 or 8 years old – never as severe as what he was going through, but I have felt a lot of the things he felt. I understood how hopeless and cyclical everything seemed. I tried to tell him that he should seek out help, that I had done so and I was doing so much better, but he refused. So (long story short) I calmly sent him off to dinner, ran to the health center, and hit them over the head with information until I was sure they would bring him in and keep an eye on him. I heard from him a few days later – just a Facebook message, telling me that he was going home to get professional help. He thanked me for being a good friend. I knew I’d done what I was supposed to do.
But it was months before I could turn a corner or open a door without seeing his face, bruised or swollen or blood-streaked, in a sudden flash. His dead eyes open and staring at me. I couldn’t even watch movies or television shows anymore because every time a character left the room I was suddenly afraid they were going to die. It was months and months before I began to feel okay again.
And that was just after one day. That was just a friend I didn’t know very well, one I wasn’t even sure if it was okay for me to like. I have no regrets; I was so glad that he talked to me and was willing to tell me so many things. Not knowing doesn’t make things any better. It’s just that the thing is, you tell someone, “I think you need to see a professional,” or worse yet, tell a professional behind their back, and you feel like the worst kind of traitor. Aren’t you just saying, “Hey, I think you’re so fucked up that I can’t deal with you anymore, so I’m handing you off to some stranger”? Aren’t you just saying, “I’ve given up on you?”
That’s not what it is at all, of course. It’s really, really hard to seek out treatment when you’re depressed and it gets harder the more severe it is. One, there’s such a stigma attached to seeing a mental health professional, especially for therapy-based treatments. For me, at least, it’s because depression has always just felt like part of who I am. If you’ve got a broken arm, you can say, “Hey, I have a broken arm. I’m looking around and nobody else has a broken arm, and this kind of hurts. I should get it fixed.” If you’ve got something broken in your brain, it’s much harder to draw a line between yourself and the sickness. Two, you treat something because you believe that it’ll get better, but depression poisons hope. Not that I probably need to tell you guys any of that.
But bottom line, depression is a disease. If you are depressed and especially if you are suicidal, you need people who will support you but you also need treatment. And you are not helpless, you need to want to get better, but that doesn’t mean it’s all in your head or that if you weren’t such a lazy fuck you would be better already. That’s just victim-shaming. People with physical illnesses or disabilities sometimes manage to get better faster with positive thinking and determination and all that stuff, but they still go to therapy and take meds too. And in fact, a higher percentage of people who start treatment for major depression recover than people who start treatment for, say, heart disease. I didn’t even know that until a couple of weeks ago.
So what I’m trying to say is:
– Understand that this thing that is eating your brain and your heart and hollowing you out from the inside isn’t you and doesn’t have to be you.Â
– Please hold on. Please try to talk to people. Don’t be discouraged if the first person you try doesn’t know how to respond – or the second, or even the third. It will be scary for them, because they won’t know how to help, and because you don’t believe that you can even be helped. But I swear there are people out there who will want to listen and help, because we don’t believe that anyone deserves to feel this way. We will listen even if it hurts and we will love you when you’ve forgotten how to love yourself.
– Think about asking to see a professional. Really think about it. Even if you’ve gone before and it never worked out – believe me, I went to psychiatrists and group therapy and single therapy and family therapy and anger management training for years and none of it helped. Some of it made things worse. I didn’t start to recover until (and this was years after my parents had given up making me go) I was willing to make it work and asked them to find me someone to talk to.
That friend, by the way? He left school for a year. I talked to him when he came back, and he’s on antidepressants now. His life isn’t perfect – therapy and meds aren’t magic – but it is much, much better. This guy who was keeping a list of suicide methods and believed he was the Antichrist is finally learning how to feel like a person again. We run in different circles most of the time, but we’ve got a lot of mutal friends. They’re a good crowd, very invested in people and relationships.
I know they’ll take care of him when he lets them in.