Depression... is there ever a time you thought, "Are you sure you meant me?" The popular opinion of depression is it relates to selfishness. However, the medical opinion of depression is it is brought on by stress. Many people suffer from stress disorders opening physical ailments, hopeless and feeling useless.
According to WebMD, symptoms of depression are back pain, fatigue, headaches, weight gain, insomnia, anger, sadness, irritability and lack of focus. A general symptom is lack of or difficulty sleeping. Coping with depression is similar to dealing with anxiety and stress. Eat a regular diet and exercise. Maintain a scheduled activity and surround yourself with familiar, trusted people.
As a person who dealt with anxiety and depression, suicidal thoughts will happen. As a teenager everyone loaded me down with expectations without solutions. This builds into resentment. Is perception altered? Not really. Why do people expect so much, without offering help? The people cheering you on become the enemy. Where are they when stress is overwhelming? They are focused on their own problems and goals.
The price of responsibility is grim. Sometimes it results in death. Are you stuck in an awful situation? One day you managed to get some support. Yet everyone always wants more, while they focus on going to work. There does not seem to be anyone around thinking about how to help you when feeling depressed or experience health problems and sometimes address the person who seems to have everything as a burden. At times it may feel like other people would like you to die.
Already trying to maintain a good grade point average, remain social, work and balance the next step to succeed, inevitably failure happens, a new level of strain surfaces. Now decision making abilities are questioned. Past successes diminish and whatever you are working on should be different.
Not to long ago I got a part-time job in order to save money, to build a business. This was not acceptable. I should be a junior trader. Whatever I did, it was always wrong. A job was necessary for flexibility to work on other things and survive. Still the persistent nagging continued. Sure I can pick and chose a job in their mind?
It would be nice to tell get angry, yet everyone knows it is a sensitive subject. They don't know what is going on in my life, piling more stress onto me until hitting a breaking point. It is flattering being respected, but respect fades into, "They could have done so much more with their life," the chant for an underachiever.
There is only one saying that has ever brought me threw several breaking points of suicidal depression. "If you commit suicide that is it, there is nothing more. No more answers to find. No more challenges. It is game over." Fortunately, the psychologist was still treating me for depression. I declared the attempt as an experiment; my parents fix problems with money. Might have stayed in the hospital longer, he never knew all the facts. My birthday is on the fifteenth and I was turning fifteen that year. I was going to swim out into the ocean and never swim back. It would look like an accident, simply caught in the rip tide.
People think lying and reputation means something to someone who has decided to take their own life. They couldn't be more wrong. While my competitive spirit won and the summer passed without incident, largely because I ended up staying in Salt Lake City before moving to "a safer environment," death is it. Nothing will ever matters to me again in this lifetime. Maybe they have problems. We all have problems, yet I don't have to expect them to take care of me and I don't have to take care of anyone.
Might be lonely; however, plenty of people need help. Each experience is valuable. Though having a catalogue of various suicide options float around in my mind. After an extended period of time working on living and forcing suicidal thoughts out of my mind, I stopped caring about any of it or decided it wasn't important.
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