Despair

There has been a lot of activity on the internet this week concerning mental health due to Robin William’s death. I am dismayed at the level of ignorance displayed by so many smart people when it comes to suicide and mental illness.

Suicide is not simple matter of choosing to live or choosing to die. There is no way to quantify the mental anguish a person is enduring behind their public facade, yet so many are quick to judge something they know little about. Expecting the mentally ill to reason their way out of their despair is the equivalent of expecting quadriplegics to walk themselves out of a forest fire. Empathizing with the physically disabled is easier than finding empathy for the mentally anguished yet the latter often only requires a moment of logical reflection.

Mental illness indirectly affects all Canadians at some time in their lives. One in five will personally experience a mental illness. If a physical disease had these types of statistics, money would flow like water to find a cure and smart people would spend less time judging and more time supporting.

“The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” - David Foster Wallace (1962 - 2008)