A rant I wrote months ago, I might as well post.

Jessica Lin
Aug 28, 2017 · 3 min read

I watched the new Netflix TV series 13 Reasons Why basically in one weekend. It was great. But not the same kind of “great” as shows like Game of Thrones or Avatar: The Last Airbender. It was the kind of “great” that sits in your mind for days — maybe even weeks — after you finish it. It makes you feel unsettled, it makes you think about your past, it makes you think about what could have been.

(For those of you who haven’t heard about the show or read the book yet, I’ll give you a one-line synopsis. The show is about a girl who kills herself and leaves cassette tapes explaining why she did it.)

I don’t have stats on how many people seriously consider killing themselves. But then you try to think about it, and you run into this issue where you don’t actually know what that even means. What does it mean to “seriously consider killing yourself?” Get the tools ready? Write out a will or a letter? What if you just think about it, do nothing actionable, but you think about it every day? Does that count?

I ask because here’s the issue — our society doesn’t know how to deal with problems that are not visible. Issues that we cannot measure or quantify. When you think about the diseases whose symptoms lie on a scale of gray, to slightly grayer, to even more gray, to eventually pitch black — at what point on that spectrum does society say “Okay, you qualify for this problem. You deserve our support.”

You have a broken arm, we see the x-ray that proves it, a doctor gave you a cast, we’ll all sign it because we can see that that’s bad.

You have a speech impediment, we hear you struggle to express yourself, a doctor recommended you a speech trainer, we’ll be extra patient conversing with you because we can see that that’s bad.

You have cancer, a doctor found the tumor in your body, put a number on the stage you’re in, we’ll create a GoFundMe because we can see that that’s bad.

But tell us you have ADD. Tell us you have depression. Tell us you have severe anxiety. Tell us you think about suicide. It suddenly becomes “Oh. How bad is it?”

And how are you supposed to answer that? Pretty bad? Really bad? Oh, I guess not too bad? You can only ever experience your own life, how are you supposed to judge, on this intangible scale full of other people’s experiences, how bad it is for you?

You can’t. But people try, and almost always they convince themselves that it must not be that bad. Because no one wants to be that egocentric who says “I have it worse than everyone else around me,” or that weakling who says “Everyone else probably deals with similar issues, but I’m too weak to deal with mine.”

So then we reach this point where no one will seek help when they should. No one thinks they deserve it, and no one will admit they need it.

Don’t worry, I’m not talking about myself. This isn’t a cry for help. It’s just frustrating. Because a few years ago, maybe I might have been talking about myself… but then, I would never have posted this at all.

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