What I’m Reading, January 30, 2015

Enough Is Never Enough with Blaming Anti-Vaxxers, Science Babe, January 24, 2015

Let’s get one thing straight; if a blogger with zero medical credentials tries to claim that they have more accurate science than the vast majority of the scientific and medical establishment, they are, on every level, wrong. I promise you, somebody who got their degree at Google University and has a waiver on their website that says “my advice isn’t designed to treat anything” has nothing to lose by giving you terrible advice. A real doctor’s advice doesn’t come with an asterisk. They will give you advice that’s grounded in real science.

Friend in Need: The tragedy of my friend’s life and death is that he lived in a society that left him to deal with it alone, Saul Elbein, Texas Observer, January 21, 2015 Continue reading

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Mental Health Reading: Drip Drip

A comic entitled “Drip Drip” starts out with two girls taking a shortcut through the woods, but then goes somewhere else entirely. Here is a sample:

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The ending may be subject to different interpretations. I think it’s about finding some shred of hope, or something to live for, when things seem at their worst. In this case, it’s friendship.

The full comic, by pirrip, is available on Imgur and Tumblr. I also reblogged it to Tumblr.

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U.S. Combat Deaths at Zero in March 2014, Suicide Rate Still Rising

March 2014 was the first month in more than ten years in which no U.S. troops died in combat. This moving photo was posted to Imgur last night:

No Karma Needed. I just wanted to share the fact that March 2014 is the first month in the last decade that had 0 American Deaths in the War on Terror. Hooah.

The good news was quickly followed, however, by a reminder of how far we have to go:

Good news indeed. Proud Army mom. However, a record number of suicides are taking place every month.

The number of suicides by American servicemembers exceeded the number of combat deaths in 2012, and the suicide rate has continued to rise since then. The number of suicides may have started outpacing combat deaths as far back as 2008. Continue reading

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Depression, in Pictures

Depression is impossible to describe in words. Any attempt to convey the experience in words ends up sounded clichéd. I have had the opportunity to try to explain my experiences in images in “The Depression Chronicles,” but the best portrayals of life with depression that I have ever seen have come from Allie Brosh, who writes the webcomic Hyberbole and a Half.

In October 2011, she wrote a post called “Adventures in Depression,” in which she described how she fell into a deep period of depression, with the attendant immobility and self-loathing. Her post captured the way someone suffering from depression can recognize the purposelessness of it, while remaining powerless to do anything about it.

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She goes on to describe how her depression “got so horrible that it actually broke through to the other side and became a sort of fear-proof exoskeleton.”

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Then she basically disappeared from the internet for over a year.

She returned the other day with a follow-up post, “Depression Part Two,” that offers perhaps the best analogy for depression I have ever seen.

I remember being endlessly entertained by the adventures of my toys. Some days they died repeated, violent deaths, other days they traveled to space or discussed my swim lessons and how I absolutely should be allowed in the deep end of the pool, especially since I was such a talented doggy-paddler.

I didn’t understand why it was fun for me, it just was.

But as I grew older, it became harder and harder to access that expansive imaginary space that made my toys fun. I remember looking at them and feeling sort of frustrated and confused that things weren’t the same.

I played out all the same story lines that had been fun before, but the meaning had disappeared. Horse’s Big Space Adventure transformed into holding a plastic horse in the air, hoping it would somehow be enjoyable for me. Prehistoric Crazy-Bus Death Ride was just smashing a toy bus full of dinosaurs into the wall while feeling sort of bored and unfulfilled.  I could no longer connect to my toys in a way that allowed me to participate in the experience.

Depression feels almost exactly like that, except about everything.

[Emphasis added, and pictures omitted.] Seriously, go read the whole post. The pictures are the key, but I don’t want to copy too many of them here.

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Depression has social stigma, to be sure, but the difficulty goes beyond that. Even if you don’t have a sore throat, or have never had a sore throat somehow, you can probably imagine the difficulties faced by someone with a bad case of strep throat. Everyone has bad moods, or gets in funks, but not everyone (most people, actually) have difficulty relating to a major depressive episode. I doubt that my experiences even remotely compare to those described in Brosh’s posts.

Clark, a blogger at Popehat, calls depression a color most people cannot see:

Depression is hard to talk about. I don’t mean “there’s a social stigma to it”, although that’s true. I don’t mean “modern society calls minor mood swings ‘depression’ and medicates them with lifestyle drugs, so the depths of true depression are hard to convey to someone”, although that’s also true.

I mean that depression is a color, and people who haven’t experienced it are color blind to its hue. There are no words to bridge the gap, to make it clear.

Much like Clark, I cannot add any words of real wisdom to what Allie Brosh has to say about her experiences. She faced the prospect of suicide and, for reasons that may not make sense to many, and that I wish did not make sense to me, is still here. I am very grateful for that.

If you need help, or know someone who does, help is out there: National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

Photo credits: All pictures are by Allie Brosh [CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US].

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Please get help if you need it

“You fly jets long enough, something like this happens” -Viper, “Top Gun”

Tony Scott, director of more than a few legendary Hollywood blockbusters, died Sunday in what by all accounts was a suicide. According to the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, he jumped from a bridge near L.A., leaving several notes behind for his family.

The news has not said much beyond speculation about the reasons why. To a certain extent, it seems like a gross invasion of privacy to delve too deeply into the issue. He reportedly had inoperable brain cancer, but we do not know if that played a role in any way. For whatever reason, he was in pain, and this must have seemed to him to be the best way out.

Over a span of six months in 2011, I lost two friends to suicide. I’ll never know exactly why. I have a sarcastic or snarky responce to nearly everything in life, but this is a subject on which I will never, ever joke. It is something I understand far better than I would like.

Most people would have looked at Tony Scott and seen someone who “had it all,” whatever that might actually mean. He may not have created iconic classics of cinema like his brother, Ridley Scott, but he left behind a memorable body of work. His films included venerable blockbusters like “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop 2,” but also the cult classic “True Romance” and the cerebral blockbuster “Crimson Tide.” His lesser-known 1990 film “Revenge,” starring Kevin Costner and Madeline Stowe, left an impression on me when I saw it in high school. It was, as its title would suggest, a story about a man who cuts a path of destruction to save the woman he loves, but it is not a Hollywood love story. It explored the fine line between love and brutality, something Scott would return to in 2004’s “Man on Fire.”

I guess my point in bringing up his filmography is to say that his career had more depth than he may get credit for, particularly with movies that took a pretty stark look at what people do when they are pushed to an edge, like Costner in “Revenge” and Denzel Washington in “Man on Fire.”

However successful a person may be, that tells you little to nothing about what they are thinking or feeling. Suicide is almost never a rational action (allowing for some extreme examples), usually brought on by a sense of desperation or hopelessness. An excellent talk by JT Eberhard from late last year about his own struggles with depression offers the view of someone who went right up to that brink and came back. He sums it up in the perfect way, a point of view I have heard from friends, and one that I can recognize in my own thoughts at certain points in my life. To roughly paraphrase how he described his thought process leading up to his suicide attempt, he said “I didn’t actually want to die, but I wanted it to stop.”

As trite as it may sound, this too shall pass. Please get some help.

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VP Biden makes a gutsy statement about depression and suicide, but still gets a lot of it wrong

VP Joe Biden gave a speech today to “families of fallen soldiers” where he spoke about his own experiences with suicidal thoughts. If you learn anything from this, it should be that it can happen to anybody:

Vice President Joe Biden, in a moving speech to families of fallen troops on Friday, recounted the dark days following the tragic deaths of his wife and daughter and talked about understanding thoughts of suicide.

“It was the first time in my career, in my life, I realized someone could go out – and I probably shouldn’t say this with the press here, but no, but it’s more important, you’re more important. For the first time in my life, I understood how someone could consciously decide to commit suicide,” he said. ”Not because they were deranged, not because they were nuts, because they had been to the top of the mountain, and they just knew in their heart they would never get there again.”

Biden was 29 and had just won his seat in Congress when his wife and daughter died in a car wreck in 1972.

[h]e said well-wishers would express their condolences and often tell him that they knew how he felt, something he resented.

“You knew they were genuine. But you knew they didn’t have any damn idea, right?” Biden told attendees at the TAPS National Military Survivor Seminar and Good Grief Camp in Arlington, Va.. “That black hole you feel in your chest like you’re being sucked back into it.”

He found a way out of his grief. Not everyone finds that.

I don’t appreciate the suggestion that people who commit suicide are “deranged” or “nuts.” It took tremendous courage to say what Biden said, but he still had to preface his words with assurances that he’s not one of the crazy ones. For having the courage to speak out about this issue, I applaud VP Biden. For still linking suicide to “craziness,” he can bite me.

He is absolutely right that the rest of us cannot fathom how the pain of his loss felt. No one can truly understand another person’s pain, so it is disappointing that he would write it off as “deranged.”

People contemplate suicide for an infinite number of reasons. In a period of six months in 2011, I lost two friends to depression. It scared me, not because it didn’t make any sense, but because it sort of did. For some people, the dark times are bad enough that they will try anything for relief, and no one else can fully understand. All the rest of us can do is live well and try to help our friends who struggle to do so too.

It’s not always a “crazy” thought in and of itself, but unless you’ve experienced depression, it’s impossible to describe or explain. A close friend once described the circumstances and thoughts that led to his suicide attempt: “Let me be clear: I don’t want to die. I just need it to stop.”

Until we can accept that people can have those types of thoughts without calling them “crazy,” this won’t get better.

(For the record, I haven’t had thoughts like that in a long time. But you never forget.)

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