The black dog never stops prowling

With the focus recently on mental health and how it just doesn’t give a fuck about how rich and famous you are, I am forced to reconcile my mental health issues. I am a recovering depressive!
I say recovering in the loosest of ways. I will probably never recover from the day I collapsed to the floor and become a blathering mess of snot and tears only to have my wife find me and not know what do. This led to the trip to the hospital and the room where every object is nailed to the floor so it doesn’t become a “weapon of mass self-destruction”. Then there were the assessment questions.
Here is the questioning:
Doc: Do you want to harm yourself?
Me: No. I just want to go to sleep and not wake up.
Doc: So you want to kill yourself?
Me: No. Just go to sleep and the world fucks off and leaves me alone.
Doc: When you say sleep do you mean die?
Me: No, I DON’T WANT TO DIE! Just please stop the world, I want to get off.
Doc: Ok you can go home then……
Yep in a delicate state and now diagnosed with severe depression and extreme anxiety, I am sent on my merry way to work things out myself.
There are certain things that drive me nuts when it comes to depression and looking in from the outside. The phrase “just make the decision to be happy instead of sad”. Depression is not sadness. People mean well and try so hard to “get it” but it is just so bloody hard to describe the demons in my head as they make their way to the forefront of my mind and start flicking switches and turning dials. These switches and dials then tell me that I am not worthy of any of this success and when everyone finds out what I am really like the whole facade will come crashing down. Now, I know that none of that is true and it is all in my head but you have to remember a persons mind is not that big really so fill it with a handful of negative thoughts and there isn’t much more room up there for rational thought.
This then brings me to the whole taking of ones life issue. I’ve heard suicide described countless times as such a selfish thing to do, but seriously when in this state of depression the last thing on your mind is other people. All you are consumed by is the need to make it stop. “Somehow I need to stop the world so I can just get off for a while. I’ll get back on after I have a little break.”
But, of course, there is no getting back on after your life has ended, but at the time it would have seemed like the most logical and easiest way to just make it stop for a while.
So as we have seen very recently we have lost of couple of my heroes to this horrible illness that does not discriminate or show prejudice. Now just imagine how many people are suffering from this each and every day in silence?
