Quote:
Originally Posted by Pomegrant
I had a professor explain to me that when he was in college he had a girl friend and they were serious and what not. At some point her mood started to change and she was getting extremely depressed and showed all the signs of it. At some point she tried to commit suicide in some awful way. Then she was placed into an intensive care type thing where she tried to kill herself all the time. Point is that he said that it would have been selfish of himself to believe that his agony of her being dead would be worse than her agony of living.
It is our societal perception that killing yourself is cowardly for some reason.
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I agree very much with the parts in bold. I think people generally lack quite a bit of empathy and so can't imagine how something feels if they've never felt it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chainsawkitten
I somehow managed to get myself to believe that it was insignificant and not serious. "If it would've been serious I'd already have killed myself." or similar thoughts. This was largely fueled by a very "anti-emo" environment were any signs of depression or emotional instability were seen as mere attention seeking. People discovering my depression was my greatest fear. I didn't want to be an annoyance and my problems were insignificant anyways.
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The greatest problems I've seen resulting from depression or any mental illness are when people do fear others finding out about it, since then the people may tend to have a limited support network. The more that can be done to get people to feel comfortable acknowledging their depression, the better.
I agree with Spike that exercise and healthful nutrition can be very helpful in fighting depression. Unfortunately, exercising and eating healthfully were usually the last things I felt able to focus on when I had some sad years and low self-esteem. The more I ate, the worse I felt, so the more I ate, for example. I felt the chance of things getting better was pretty hopeless, so what was the use in trying; I was doomed to failure anyway. And if I *did* take a step that I felt was helpful for me, but then backslid, I felt even *worse* about myself. It became a vicious cycle of negative thinking.