About a week ago, someone started a thread to discuss the Brittany Maynard assisted suicide case. The discussion became rather heated, and one of the posters tossed out a comment that disturbed me greatly.
This poster suggested that patients with depression should be allowed assisted suicide, because, after all, "depression is terminal" -- meaning, I suppose, that it isn't a condition that can be cured.
I didn't want to derail the thread, but I can't let a comment like that pass by unanswered. I would like to know if this poster has any personal experience with depression. I would be willing to bet that he/she has no clue about what depression is really like.
I have depression. My mother has severe depression. It runs in my family, and two of my siblings suffer from it as well. We know depression from the inside.
It's horribly easy to toss off some flippant comment about depressives being allowed to kill themselves. Depression plays tricks with your mind. There have been times in my life when I really wanted the pain to stop -- even if that meant death. Then the blackness passed, and I was happy to be alive and incredibly grateful I hadn't put a gun in my mouth.
Depression may not go away, like a broken leg, but it is NOT terminal. Terminal is cancer, heart failure -- any condition that kills you whether you want to die or not. Depression only kills you if you let it.
The last thing depressives like me need to hear is that it's OK to kill yourself if you have a diagnosis of depression. We struggle with suicidal ideation anyway. We don't need encouragement to end it all -- at our blackest points our own brains give us all the suicidal arguments we need. We need someone to encourage us to keep slogging on, someone to tell us that no matter how bad things feel right now, eventually our feelings will change and the world will be bright again. We need a hand to help pull us up out of the pit.
To the person that posted that comment, you know who you are -- don't make ignorant, insensitive remarks about someone else's struggle. You don't know what it's like.
