I believe I feel so strongly on the subject because I've been down that road. I wouldn't get out of bed for days, wished for death blah, blah, blah... I'm not sure when it happened anymore, but my dad started talking to me about exercising and eating right. My thoughts are if I, during my idiot teenage angst years, could start to recognize what I was doing to myself and my life and that I was going nowhere fast, anybody should be able. They say your higher reasoning and frontal lobe isn't fully developed until you hit your early to mid twenties, so if I was able to figure that out then, why can't fully grown adults see that now? They thrive off of the attention they are receiving (exceptions to the rule aside - ie. real sufferers of real depression) and you just keep giving in and feeding it to them. Why can't anybody function normally anymore? why do we need to take medication and constantly hold others' hands for them and pet them on their head like a pet doggy? what's next, an ass-wiping program?

Right, I completely agree with the first things you said. I just think some people get themselves so deep into their depression, they literally don't know how to function properly on their own. I've been down that path as well, and my parents did the same ****, and little by little, I started getting better.
But that doesn't mean the same things work for everyone, and it doesn't mean that the world would be better with the people who mope around and complain, they just need the same push we got. I think that's what's important.

It's not so much the push, as it is what you do with the information given to you. You can A) choose to ignore and continue to revel in your self-loathing and continue to suck in attention or B) realize you're acting like a twat, hurting yourself and your family and make a plan of action
Some people need a harsh jolt of reality and/or need to do some serious introspection to realize what's going on around them. Unfortunately, this doesn't occur often enough.

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.

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.

I believe suicide is cowardly, life is all about taking the good with the bad.

The thing about depression is that - I think it's something a person does inside their heads i.e. a verb and not a noun. So when someone says, "person A is depressed", it's just that I think their neurons are running down a certain pathway over and over and over again, ad infinitum (Of course, my explanation can be a lot more complicated in that every other part of our body does get involved/affected too). And so, I've always disliked this freudian psychoanalytic approach of trying to find the 'root cause' and 'why' someone is depressed. Think of a person like woody allen - sheesh, such a creative man but he's been depressed for how long?! And these therapist haven't yet found a way?

Listening to your friend's 'reasons' on why they are depressed might earn you his/her trust, but clearly, that's not what we are after. And giving drugs does make a lot of depressives 'dependent' on it after a while. Many view it in a way that something is broken and drugs fix them. But it's all neurologically learnt on one level or another. It just means that people are quick learners (in the case of depressives, a lot of stupid things ofcourse!). In many cases, a single incident can get a person depressed pretty quickly. And this in-turn forms a neurological imprint and a very skillful way of getting even more depressed in the future! Really, it's a very tough skill which many seem to master. It fascinates me that we humans have an inborn talent for depression. Requires a lot of hard work to stay depressed for a long time!

I'm not sure of a good way of beating depression (I don't believe that drugs are the best option), but some sort of 'shock treatment' always works temporarily. Shock treatment in the sense that I mean an attack on their brains that diverts their attention very quickly and to just stop thinking of those stupid thoughts.

It helps to quote what you're responding to. I assume you're responding to me, but if not well...that proves my point.

Because depression is a moving target, its very easy for people to co-opt the symptoms. I merely point it out to say that people with actual depression do generally look for cures. I wasn't meaning to address frauds in that post.

Yeah I'm bad at that :( I just assume I'll be the next person down when I post.. and I ended up taking forever. My bad.. I'll bring the beers. I was responding to Spike*Spiegel.

yes.

having said that, i do think suicide (and the possibility of committing the act) is something everyone needs to address eventually during their development.

the ONLY time i'd say it's justified are for cases of euthanasia - and only once terminal symptoms have started appearing. otherwise you're taking the easy way out of dealing with an unpleasant situation that 99.9% of the time you chose to get yourself into (or chose to remain firmly rooted within). the same goes for treatment, you can either chose to address the symptoms or take the time and effort necessary to discover the root cause and address that. i think the former is the easiest way out and likely the biggest reason there are so many pill junkies out there. people aren't dealing with their issues, they're only dealing with symptoms.

I think that at its core, the act of suicide is cowardly. I recognise that you could say that someone has the right to take control of their own life and maybe that includes the choice to end it but if you have issues which lead to you deciding to end your life rather than deal with them then you are passing these issues onto those you leave behind and that, in my opinion, is selfish.

However, I also think it depends entirely on cirumstances.

Some peoples attitude towards those with depression is disgusting. Everyone who is depressed, everyone who harms themselves, everyone who kills themselves are attention seeking whores who won't be missed. It's really beyond me how some people can be so ignorant. People say that some of these individuals who have gone through with it and killed themselves should have made more of an effort to seek help but frankly, it doesn't seem that others are always willing to help. For example, one of the things that annoys me greatly is that i have encountered people who harm themselves simply to get attention. Where some may hide it as it embarrasses them or is personal, others will start to wear t shirts or roll their sleeves up, maybe cover their skin in bandages, anything to bait people into asking questions and paying them attention.

Even though this irritates me to no end, i can also see why some people might do it. They may simply just be reaching out to someone to help them as it's not always as black and white as "be depressed" and "don't be depressed." Sometimes people just really need to push themselves and feel they need someone to help them through their recovery as they can't do it on their own. Alot of drug addicts and smokers feel the exact same way about kicking a habit or an addiction, they simply don't feel they have the motivation or the will power on their own. But even so, how many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of "Let them kill themselves" or "I hope the next time they cut themselves, they slit their wrists!" and write these people off as nothing but attention seekers, whiners and complainers. How about you try to open your tiny little mind for a moment to the possibility that everything is that not necessarily as you see it yourself and that with a change of attitude from these kind of people, there could be less and less people suffering from depression/commiting suicide and less of an issue for you to to be so quick to pass judgement on.