by uprunforlife | Aug 1, 2017
Often times the person suffering from major depressive disorder is in denial that they have a problem and feel that they are just sad. Unlike a bout of sadness, major depressive disorder affects every aspect of your life and it isn’t something that will go away on its own.
When a young woman texted DoSomething.org with a heartbreaking cry for help, the organization responded by opening a nationwide Crisis Text Line for people in pain. Nearly 10 million text messages later, the organization is using the privacy and power of text messaging to help people handle addiction, suicidal thoughts, eating disorders, sexual abuse and more. But there’s an even bigger win: The anonymous data collected by text is teaching us when crises are most likely to happen — and helping schools and law enforcement to prepare for them.
My sister's letter...... I am a pathological liar. I lie to everyone around me. I say I have friends, that I am busy, happy, nice, smart. The person I lie to the most is me. I tell myself that I'm worth something and that I prefer not to have anyone who likes me. Everyone leaves a room I enter. People stop talking when I get close. When I say something it is ignored or made fun of. In less than a day I can go from bouncing off the walls to don't even want to move. Sometimes I go entire weeks where having no one who wants me around doesn't bother me at all, then I cry for weeks for being so pathetic that I don't even have one friend.
A mentally ill young male kills innocents. He had struggled with – fill in the blank mental illness (autism, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia) – and did not receive treatment, or did not agree to treatment, or did not respond to treatment. He and his family tried to get help, but failed, and eventually his family gave up. The young man became a loner, living quietly on the margins of society, until, one day, he had enough and decided to kill himself.
Like suicide-by-cop, he decided to kill himself by killing others, thereby ensuring that police would kill him, and, if not, he could always kill himself at the end. It might be in a movie theater, or a subway station, or at a mall where a politician would speak, or – worst of all – in an innocent elementary school.
He had access to guns, yes, but it was an insane mind that pulled the triggers, a mind, often, with a treatable disease. Not infrequently, we know the disease, we know how to treat it, we have the treatments. It is sometimes the case that it is not lack of knowledge which leads to tragedy; it is the inability to implement what we know.
This is not a problem of ignorance; it's a problem of public will.
