Every year, the Lifeline and other mental health organizations and individuals across U.S and around the world raise awareness of suicide prevention during
the National Suicide Prevention Month. In accordance to this, I wrote an article in honor of this upcoming month to help people be aware that suicide and depression isn’t just seen on books, movies, and TV shows, but it is real and in fact, happening.
According to research, suicide claims more lives than natural disasters and heart diseases combined. While according to General Statistics, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the United States, and in 2017 (latest available data) there were 45, 143 reported suicide deaths globally. But to understand more about suicide, we must first understand what causes it: Depression. Most people suffer from depression than coronary heart disease, cancer, and HIV/AIDS combined. Depression is a common mental disorder and the leading cause of disability worldwide. At its worst, depression leads to suicide. So first, what really is depression?
Depression is hard to explain. But I’ll try anyway. Depression is like a disease. It tears you apart. The things you loved doing before, is just meaningless now. You don’t smile much because there isn’t a reason for you to. Depression makes everything feels worthless and hopeless. It’s sad, isn’t it? It’s so difficult to explain depression to someone who’s never been there because it’s not sadness. It’s not crying. It’s not dressing in black. Depression is the constant feeling of being numb. Being numb to emotions, being numb to lie. Days become annoying obstacles that just needs to be faced. And how do you face these “annoying obstacles”? you face them through medication, through drinking, through smoking, and through cutting. Because when your depressed, you grasp on to anything that can get you through the day. That’s what depression is. It’s not sadness nor tears. It’s the overwhelming sense of numbness and the desire for anything that can help you make it from one day to the next.
No life is easy. We all know what it’s like to be left desperately confused. The unanswered questions gnawing at every fiber of your being. Keeping you awake at night, and leaving you exhausted in the morning. Reading books became my own defense mechanism against the horrible realities of the world. The truth is, we are all human. And like I, imperfect. We all make mistakes and sometimes, mistakes neither of us were able to recover from. But the sad truth is, nobody ever really knows how much anyone else is hurting. No matter how much you think you know a person- no matter how pretty they are, or how popular they may seem, you can never really know what their lives are like. We could be sitting next to a person who is completely broken and not know about it. Not unless we ask them. And not unless we’re listening.
There are a lot of things on how to cope up with depression. Some take medication, others go for a run. But in the end, we’re all just searching for that tiny space, perhaps a hole, that gives us shelter from the terrible reality of the world.
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