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Depression
is Depression
is when you can't sleep and you get so bored
looking at your roof, that you spend weeks
nights contemplating what to do with it only to
find that you wouldn't have enough determination
to do it.
depression isn't always suicide.
depression is ovbious to only yourself. suicide
is ovbious to everyone.
depression is, and always will be, my, and many
others, mays of life.
depression runs my life. makes me do things i
shouldn't do.
depression is that voice in the back of your
head telling you, that you need help.
depression makes you gain weight, loose weight,
not eat, eat too much.. do drugs. give or take a
few.
depression has the feeling of death, without the
dying part.
depression is still killing you even if you have
the best things in the world.
depression isn't just having too little, it's
having too much as well.
depression is never seeing your father happy.
depression is loosing your brother too his
girlfriend.
depression is the killing of the broken pieces
of your heart.
depression is slow motion and fast motion at the
same time.
depression is the illusion that the world has
turned it's back on you and everyone in it.
depression is seeing happiness everywhere you
go.
depression is hoping to survive and hoping not
to at the same time.
depression isn't contemplating suicide, but
wishing you were already there.
depression is when the only thing that cares is
the depression itself.
depression is when you are at school and you
can't remember things you learnt in grade 5.
depression is falling alseep in your favourite
subject.
depression is hating yourself because your
parents hate you.
depression is the hatred of your family.
depression eats your insides witha smile on it's
face.
depression is the look in your eyes when you
wake up in the morning, knowing you have to live
another day.
depression is yourself. you are depression.
depression makes you who you are and who you'll
always never want to be.
depression makes you miss your old self, but
once your better, you miss depression.
but for me, mostly, depression is all of these,
plus, depression is when you have had it so long
that you are scared of who you will be when and
if you get better. you wonder if you could
survive happy and if the happiness would eat
you.
now ask yourself.. do you have depression?
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THE BUG IN THE CUP CHAPTER 6 |
Now
that we have a little more time together, in the next few
chapters I want you to do some
exploring with me. I want you to imagine, for the moment anyway,
that for the last several weeks
or months you have been like a bug trapped in the bottom of a
cup. How you got in the cup, I
don't know. How you will get out of the cup will be, most
likely, a result of something you do, or
what someone helps you to do. And, just maybe, I can help you a
little.
The bug-in-the-cup idea is not mine, I got it from another
psychologist who, in his lectures, used
to use the example of a bug trapped in a cup to illustrate a
major problem we all face from time
to time: namely, that once we are trapped in a situation, our
solutions are limited by what we can
see. We have walked around and around inside our cup and, seeing
no way out, we decide that
all hope is finished and that we are forever trapped.
We climb up, but slip back down. Everything we try fails. Then,
when we are convinced there
are no possible escapes left to us, we become depressed and
helpless and hopeless and,
sometimes, suicidal.
Imagine with me, if you will, that you and I are going to take a
trip to a distant planet. Our flight
is booked and we are leaving next Tuesday. We have a few days to
pack and the people in charge
of the flight have told us we must be ready in three days. While
food and water will be supplied,
each of us can bring along only ten things. We will be gone from
earth for one year.
What would be our first step?
Should we, for example, each go home and write down the ten
things we would most want to
have along on such a trip and then pack them up? Or, should we
first have a meeting and jointly
decide which twenty things we should take together?
The answer is obvious to anyone who has ever participated in
this little game. In a word, you
don't want to start off on a trip to a distant planet with two
guitars, two television sets, and two
copies of the same book. Rather, if we will work together, we
will come up with a much better
list, a list that doesn't overlap and one that gives each of us
many more of the things we would
like to take along on such a trip.
My point is this: If you think that you alone must solve all the
problems of living, then you had
better be damned smart!
In my experience, people (including myself) are not nearly as
smart as they sometimes think they
are. We think that because our eyes and ears and brains are all
in working order, that we can
know what to do in all sorts of situations we have never been in
before.
But this simply is not true.
All of us are like bugs in a cup -- we can see around the
insides of our cup, but we cannot see
over the lip. We cannot see what lies beyond. And what we cannot
see, we cannot imagine
doing.
Then, too, there is the matter of information. As I have said,
it is my belief that all of us make the
best decisions we can given the information we have at hand when
we make the decision. For
example, I have little doubt that the decision to die by suicide
is the best decision available for
people who decide to do it.
They have thought everything through, weighed everything, and,
when they ran all the available
data through that computer in their head, suicide was the
answer.
But wait a minute.
Did they have all the information available to make the
decision? Did they know, for example,
that the depression they are experiencing is highly treatable
and probably time-limited?
Did they know that someone out there in the future of their
lives could come to love and cherish
them?
Did they know that, within a few days, things could begin to
change for the better and that their
formula should have included these changes?
Or did they, like the person in our space-trip game, just go
home and pack ten things?
While I am not suggesting that suicide is always a stupid
decision, I am suggesting that it may be
an uniformed one and that, before we decide to kill ourselves,
maybe we ought to give ourselves
a bit of time to come to know something we maybe didn't know
before, something that might
give us a different view -- maybe even a view over the edge of
the cup.
So, for the next few chapters, I'm going to give you some
information you may not have. This
information may or may not make a difference, but I am going to
bet that it will.
While human beings are bigger and supposedly smarter than bugs,
I am not so sure that, when it
comes to getting ourselves out of the cups we find ourselves in,
we always do a better job of it.
Once we are into a particular set of problems, I am not so sure
all of us can think our way out of
them -- at least all by ourselves.
In this morning's newspaper I read an account of a farmer who
killed himself. He left a wife and
family behind. For most of his life he had been a successful man
but now, with prices for his
cattle and wheat falling, he was faced with enormous debts that
he could not pay. He had
inherited the farm from his father and had, we can only guess,
felt that to lose the farm was to
lose everything. And so, in good health, still young but no
doubt depressed, he killed himself.
As I read this story, I thought of the bug in the cup. I thought
of this man as stuck in a situation
from which he could see no escape. And when I reread the story,
it was clear to me that the
farmer had not talked to his wife or his friends about being
trapped in a cup.
Everyone was "shocked" at his suicide. So I concluded that those
who knew and loved him could
only be "shocked" if he had never told them of how trapped and
depressed he felt. And, at least
from the story, it appeared to me that he had killed himself
without reaching out for other
possible solutions, other possible ways to get out of the cup.
In a word, he had "kept his
problems to himself" and died with his honor intact.
Maybe you, like me, think it is a tragedy that a man would kill
himself because he could not pay
a debt. Maybe you are thinking that if you had been in his
shoes, you could have done something
different. Sold the farm and started a business? Moved to
California and become an artist? Gone
back to college to become an engineer? We can only guess what he
might have done with the
years yet ahead of him.
But of one thing I am sure; so long as any of us take it upon
only our own shoulders to solve a
problem, we will be limited in how well we solve it.. |
Suicide Teen Suicide the forever
decision
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