I have been seriously depressed twice in my life. Both bouts of depression were caused by a concrete incident or situation – a stinker boyfriend and a bad school for Ian. Those periods were short in duration and went away when the situation improved. I'm not sure if I should really characterize those periods as "seriously" depressed or not, but they were certainly gloomy times when I walked around in a daze unable to imagine laughing again. In a way those depression episodes were a gift, because it gave me a glimpse of the pain that some people have to carry around permanently.
I am still struck about the reactions to Aaron Swartz's suicide. Would he have killed himself, if he could see how many people were mourning his death?
I thought I would just offer an open thread on depression on this blog. Do you or a loved one struggle with depression? Is there anything that we can do to help?
Apt. 11d 
Would he have killed himself, if he could see how many people were mourning his death?
I didn’t know him, but this seems to be unlikely to have been a factor, given that he was famous in a very personally connected way. It seems impossible that he didn’t know that many, many people cared about him — he must have just been in an emotional place where that didn’t help.
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One thing that concerned me about some of the reactions was what seemed the implicit belief that the legal persecution caused his death. I am (over) sensitive about this due to my own struggles with depression.
I followed a link to a Wil Wheaton post from Twitter yesterday-“Depression Lies”. I don’t think he invented the term, but that’s where I read it most recently.
Severe depression tells you that suicide is the logical way to deal with the situation. It can tell you that all the people who care about you will be better off without you anyway.
I’m not letting individuals or institutions off the hook for creating the bad situation, but in the end it’s the illness, depression, that tells a person suicide is the solution.
And I’m not going on about this to somehow blame the person who commits suicide instead. Especially not Aaron Swartz, whom I only know from what I’ve read on the internet. I just want to add my voice to others saying that if you are depressed and think there is no way out, that thought is a lie. Get help.
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I’ve had three episodes of serious depression:
(1) when my husband left me for a college student
(2) when my (post-divorce)boyfriend started seeing (and ultimately married) my best friend
(3) when my baby died
I’ve lost years of my life to depression. Lost, as in, looking back, I can’t remember anything about those years except how sad and hopeless I was.
But, these days, I’m fine. At least until the next disaster hits.
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I also wonder if the absence of actual human contact was a problem. It seems so many people today carry out their closest friendships online rather than in person or even on the phone. How many of the people now mourning his death actually spoke to him? How many times month did he sit down with someone and have a conversation? I’m not blaming his friends or family; I just think it’s easy to feel like you’re in touch with someone you’re emailing/texting/FBing when they sense it as more distant.
It’s true that for someone with certain kinds of clinical depression, this would make no difference.
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I just wrote a little about this on my own blog. I wrote something better yesterday, but lost it. I’ve been depressed enough to seek help, and my son, as many of you regulars may know, is currently suffering. The thing that I’ve learned is what Luo said, a depressed person’s logic isn’t the same as everyone else’s. My dad was recently upset that my son hadn’t returned his call. He couldn’t understand why GB wouldn’t feel obligated, and I had to explain that that’s just it, he doesn’t. He doesn’t feel connected to anyone, so he doesn’t worry about upsetting him. He doesn’t feel remorse for not calling. It’s not in a psychopathic way, but just that he’s in his own hole and can’t see what others might feel.
So for Swartz, he probably would still kill himself because he just wouldn’t feel the kind of connection need to feel good about the outpouring of support. It’s a very strange thing, but I kind of understand it now.
Dealing with depression as a parent or close friend is exhausting. You’re worried all the time. I’ve run home from work to make sure my kid is still alive. I’ve removed knives, string, belts, shoelaces, drugs from his room and from places where we can’t keep track of it. Then there’s lots of talking, checking in, talking about how he’s feeling. Those conversations can be unnerving because they reveal things you just didn’t want to know. For a while, GB would say, “I just don’t see the point . . .” Thankfully, he no longer says this.
I talked to GB a little about Aaron and how sad it made me that such a promising person would end his life. Even he didn’t understand. Even if the case against him wasn’t the direct cause, it might have been a trigger event. Many people have such events, or the build up of stress in life can do it, too. I’ve noticed certain things that tend to send GB a little deeper: talking about college or schoolwork is the primary one. He just shuts down. That, too, has gotten better.
We have a friend who’s a psychiatrist and I said to him, I don’t know how you do that day in and day out. He said, “People get better. That makes it easier.”
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I have a sort of “backwards” relationship with clinical depression. While I am, at baseline, generally upbeat and happy, when I was a senior in High School I suffered extreme depression as a side effect of a prescription medicine I was taking for non-emotion-based reasons. It took 6 months to figure out what was wrong, and another 6 weeks for the drugs to work through my system before I was my happy-go-lucky self again.
While it was going on, I spent lots of time trying to figure out WHY I was depressed. I came up with some pretty good reasons, too. But the only real reason is that my brain chemistry had been temporarily screwed up.
So, I don’t like these articles about how MIT drove him to suicide, or that he wouldn’t have done it if his friends cared a little more. There is a real difference between feeling depressed because something depressing is happening, and being Depressed because that is the only way your brain will let you be. And you cannot really extrapolate from one to the other.
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I’d say I had long periods of fairly low-level depression (don’t want to get up in the morning, but do anyway) — stuff I should have gotten help for but didn’t. Then, three years ago, the kind of depression that causes you to lose 1/4 of your body weight, prevents you sleeping, etc, which bled into a kind of breakdown when I discovered what it was in my situation that I was responding so badly to. That was the period (maybe 2 months) in which I thought, for the first time, “well, I can see why someone would want to end it all if they felt worse than this, and thought it would not end”. I am, actually, grateful for that — both because it prompted me to do things I should have done years ago to improve my emotional make-up, and because it has enabled me to understand other people’s pain much better.
I have given emotional support to one person who, I know (but before I was giving her support), got very close to the point Aaron reached. But she didn’t actually do it, and although, in the first year or so that I was supporting her, I knew it was possible that she would commit suicide, I think I understood that, if she did, it would not be my fault in any way. If I hadn’t known her, I do not know how my own situation would have worked out — through my friendship with her I understood what I had to do myself when I broke down. (She is ok now — she said to me just the other day, after complaining about something that was really upsetting her: “It is so nice to have normal problems that most young adults have”)
Aaron clearly struggled with depression for a long time. But — when you go after someone the way that the DoJ went after Aaron, you have to take some responsibility for the consequences. Its not as if being prone to depression is some incredibly unusual condition like, say, being deadly allergic to molasses. It is something that your victim may well have. I have been on the wrong end of legal/police action a couple of times, and I am very glad that neither of those happened to me when I was seriously depressed.
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“It took 6 months to figure out what was wrong, and another 6 weeks for the drugs to work through my system before I was my happy-go-lucky self again.”
I was on the pill for about a month a year ago for anemia. I was supposed to be on it longer, but then I noticed that I was depressed and begged my doctor to take me off. I was having obsessive negative thoughts and spending hours howling with anguish. My symptoms started to lift after the first skipped dose and at the two week point, they were pretty much gone. (At the time, it was easy to confuse with grief, but as we’ve discussed in a previous thread, grief and depression are actually rather distinct.)
From my reading, I have the impression that depression is something that you get more susceptible to the longer you spend under, so it is important to surface as quickly as possible. Also, I believe that women are particularly likely to have depressive episodes, and I suspect that female hormones probably have quite a lot to do with that.
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My point was that there is a difference because “I am depressed because of X, and if X is fixed, I won’t be depressed anymore,” and “I have Depression.”
If you are depressed because your job sucks and your husband is abusive, then if you leave your husband and change jobs, you won’t be depressed anymore.
If you have Clinical Depression, then cognitive therapy or changing your life situation won’t fix it. When I read, “Would he have killed himself, if he could see how many people were mourning his death?” or the articles blaming MIT or the police, it assumes that suicide is caused by a real thing. But most suicides are caused by depression (or, more often, becoming slightly less depressed enough to act on your depression.) It is a mistake to try to link it to real world events as if the decision was rational.
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Yeah, Ragtime. At my first job out of college, my friends and I were nice to a new girl. Had lunch with her and stuff. That lifted her out of her depression enough to take a cab to the George Washington bridge wearing only a hospital nightgown and then jump off.
Clinical depression is way different than depressed for a cause. The good thing is meds. Meds have been a real life saver for many of my friends.
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But, it is also true that clinical depression can be exacerbated by outside issues. There’s even some evidence that schizophrenia can be modulated by events.
All indications are that Swartz suffered from recurrent depression and struggled with it (the blog post, for example). We have a number of writerly examples of that kind of depression (David Foster Wallace, Virgina Wolfe, Sylvia Plath. What I find interesting in these descriptions is how hard some of them fought against the weight of that depression before giving up. The story about Wallace is that his depression eventually became untreatable.
Another interesting characteristic that Ragtime mentions is the ability of the brain to superimpose reason on randomness, even when the randomness is generated in the brain. That’s what our brains do, and its why weird things like mixed up connections, neurotransmitters, and synapses can come out sounding like coherent plans and stories (depression, schizophrenia, drug-induced hallucinations, sleep, all being examples).
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I think there is an exception to the “suicides caused by depression” rule (which, as you say, I think is the main cause). The exception is something along the lines of a “honor suicide.” I think it exists in male culture in general, which is for men to believe that they have fallen short of the role they were to play in society and to kill themselves in response to their failure. In some cultures (i.e. Japanese) it was the right thing to do (as opposed, say, to many Western culture practices, where it is a sin to take that way out). Sometimes I think that logic can play a role, and its more important to watch out for it in other cultures.
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Because my depression hit at the beginning of my Senior Year of High School, I had decided that the issue was that about a third of my friends were a grade ahead and had moved away for college. It made sense, and was the only real substantive change in my life. Later on, it became clear that of course I did miss them, but not to the extent that it would impact my overall mood.
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