Many people think that a suicide attempt is a selfish; that the person must not care about everyone they are going to leave behind. I can tell you that when a person gets to the point that they want to take their own life, they truly believe that their loved ones will be much better off with them gone. Depression is a mental illness, not an act of selfishness; it is a dreadful disorder and seems relentless. A lot of us have been close to that edge, or have dealt with family members in a crisis. Some of us have lost friends and loved ones due to depression. We need to stop sweeping mental illness under the rug and become aware of the fact that suicide is not a choice. Depression is just as real of an illness as cancer. It kills you from the inside out and you don’t always have a say. The only real difference is instead of being physical throughout the whole body, the pain is trapped inside the head where the ends don’t quite meet up. There is a lack of a chemical called serotonin causing the person to feel miserable, sometimes to the point where they feel that life isn’t even worth living. Depression is a darkness that eats away at your soul until there is nothing left. Depression is never full and it finally ends up taking lives. Precious lives of people whom no one would ever expect. It doesn't matter how great the person's friends and family are. It doesn't matter that the person has the greatest support system, that they're loved, they're athletic, they're looked up to, and cared about. When depression takes ahold of someone and consumes them, the person can't see all the great in life. Instead they see all the darkness that has consumed them. It's not anyone's fault. Depression is an animal.

Imagine as if you’ve fallen into a deep dark place where it's hard to see any light. You squint and fight to catch the faintest glimmers of sunshine but all of your attempts lead to failure. However, you continue to try day to day but each day gets harder and harder, your hope continuing to diminish a little more with each failed attempt. You finally surrender, continuing to plummet into this dark abyss where the walls are covered with slick, black slime making it impossible to climb out of. There are no handles, no edges to grab onto as you scramble to try to find a way out of this misery you have discovered. Every time that you try to get out, you only fall deeper as the storm continues to rumble on overhead. It continues to rain, the walls only becoming slicker. There is no light; there is no hope. You find yourself starting to drown, not only from the rainwater in this abyss but also from your own tears because you’re stuck with no hope of escape. The littlest forms of failure are enough to send you into a spiral of self-hatred and grief where you find yourself tumbling further into this abyss that you now call home. But nobody knows that this is your home but you.

Your parents and friends would expect you to have a difficult time getting out of bed or that you would stop doing the things you once loved and start sleeping more. They’d expect your grades to drop or that you’d ignore your friends and that maybe you’d complain of a low mood. Yet you have shown none of these common symptoms of depression.

http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/detecting-de...

This is why depression is so complicated and catches some of us by surprise. Some of us play off depression very well; nobody would ever guess that we had anything wrong with us because we have learned to hide our emotions so well. Those are the people that kill themselves. It’s never anyone’s fault. They didn’t want to let you down, so they held in these negative emotions that they felt and kept living for you as long as they could. They wanted to be that happy child that you had raised. You had done nothing wrong to make them unhappy. Nobody had but since that is so difficult to understand, they decided to stay quite so that there wouldn't be any confusion. Depressed individuals just want to make everyone else happy because they know what it’s like to feel so miserable to the point of ending their own lives and they’d never wish that upon anyone else.

The key thing to remember with depression is that somebody else doesn't have to cause it. Some people are just genetically predisposed to it and others have chemical imbalances. You’d know if you gave your kid depression, other thanthat, you have nothing to feel guilty about. If you put your kid in time-out for misbehaving, then no, that’s completely reasonable and you’re not the reason for their issues. If you sat there and physically abused them, and then yes, you have reason to feel guilty for their issues. You can’t stop the inevitable and sadly, depression has the way of affecting anyone that it wants.

The only way to beat it before it's too late is to get help. If you or someone you know is suffering from suicidal thoughts, go talk to someone about your feelings. Confide in someone you trust that won’t judge you because people will judge you. I’d be lying if I said that they wouldn't. Even though people don’t judge others for having physical illnesses, like heart disease or cancer, mental illness is still stigmatized but the more we share the truth about it, the less it will be swept under the rug. Depression is just as real and just as dangerous, if not more. It takes more and more lives each year and the numbers are on the rise.

Depression needs to be beat and sometimes you can't beat it alone... the good news is, is that you’re not alone. And NEVER fear getting help because there is more than one person out there that knows what you're going through. I know what you’re going through and so do many others. We all need to stand together in life. A team is stronger than a single person. And if you lost a loved one to suicide, just remember that it isn’t your fault; depression is its own killer, just like cancer.

Join my team in this battle. Stop the stigma against depression. Feel free to share.