Of Love and Depression

All we need is... therapy, medication... and acceptance.

6:31 am... The Beatles told us that we only needed love, and everything would fall into place from there. It's a nice thought. Unfortunately, the world, both internal and external, is much more complicated than that. 

Don't get me wrong love is an awesome thing. It moves mountains sometimes, and sometimes it just keeps you from drowning in your own emotional whirlpool. A headline today, which did not surprise me one bit, announced that half of mentally ill people in the United States do not get treatment. Yesterday, a headline indicated that 30% of those with depression are undiagnosed. I am certainly one of those people. 

Whether these are two headlines from the same study, I don't know, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that, as a culture, we ignore depression and other mental illness. Literally half of you reading this will struggle with depression, anxiety, ADHD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or some other issue which makes your life harder. And, although help is available in many cases, like me, most of the rest of you just "deal with it" and go about your life. There are those who cannot function without help. The most important person in the world to me is one of those people. Sadly, it is almost a good thing that depression can be so extreme as to demand attention. Because then, at least, it actually gets some.

It's nearly impossible to miss a person in a wheelchair, or someone who has lost both arms. Those people are obviously  in need of care and assistance. But for a long time we simply labeled those with mental illness as "lazy" or "stupid" or "crazy". And despite having vastly improved our awareness and understanding of these afflictions, our culture still turns a blind eye more often than not. It may be because we can't see what's wrong, we don't know how to react to it. You can tell when a petite woman needs help getting a box from the top shelf in the grocery store. It requires a lot more attention to realize that the man next to her is thinking about killing himself.

I have neither the expertise, nor the bandwidth to provide guidance to the reader on how to improve this situation. But, I will offer this... Look to yourself. Consider the times when you find yourself on the emotional roller coaster of life, think about the difficulty you have concentrating, and pay attention to the cycles of problems you see your relationships going through. Be aware of you. Get help for you! If we each can learn to take better care of ourselves, then we'll be more able to help others when they need it.

Depression sucks KILLS.

Take care of yourselves... Take care of each other... 6:57 am...