Suicidal Dreams

No, this isn’t a post about me having suicidal dreams or anyone for that matter. I’m quoting the Silverchair song “Suicidal Dreams”. There’s two lines in there that really made me think about the latest string of suicides we’ve had in the entertainment world with fashion designer Andrew McQueen, actor Andrew Koenig and Marie Osmond’s son, Michael Blosil.

I used to think that depression was a result of something drastic that happened in your life such as the loss of a close loved one, the premature ending of a dream career, drug use gone bad or just general unhappiness about life. One could also make the claim that most people fall into depression because of financial troubles or just being lonely.

And then, every so often you hear a story about someone who you think had it all. Someone that had tons of friends, lots of money and everything else that most people aspire to have. Your first response is usually along the lines of “what do they have to be depressed about?”

Well, sometimes the answer(s) to that question are not so clear. The doctors tell us depression is a chemical imbalance in your brain and although it can be triggered by and greatly enhanced by traumatic events in your life, for the most part, it’s either there or it’s not. So to fix it, we generally take a antidepressant which is supposed to correct the imbalance and bring us back to “life”.

However, doctors are now saying that these drugs don’t work as well as people are led to believe (upwards of 60% of treated patients say they don’t feel a difference). They say that with the exception of extreme cases, these drugs don’t do anything at all. In fact, most doctors openly admit that they’re not really sure how they’re supposed to work anyway!

This would completely explain why, in a country where 10% of antidepressant takers are people above the age of 6, we don’t have any significant reduction in the amount of depression cases. It’s also important to note that most doctors don’t even directly link depression to suicide. Essentially anyone who has thought about taking their own life is usually faced with that idea after seemingly exhausting all possible ways of living. These people can’t control/handle their lives and/or their looking for an easy escape.

Who’s to judge? But, how can we help? Or can we help?

The lines in the song I mentioned earlier are: “Help me, comfort me. Stop me from feeling what I’m feeling now.”

It’s sad to see people at the end of their rope. I only knew of one person who killed himself and the story was that he did it over a girl. He hanged himself in the closet. Then you have your string of famous celebrity suicides who just couldn’t take life anymore: Kurt Cobain, Hunter S. Thompson, Cliff Baxter (vice-chairman of Enron), Ray Combs (host of the Family Feud) and of course Adolf Hitler, but he had another reason.