Sunlight

A series of tweets from @johnmoe

"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants." - Louis Brandeis

I’ve thought of that quote many times in recent years as I’ve talked here and elsewhere about depression, mental health, suicide. #sunlight

I thought about it when Eric Slocum, a newsman in my hometown of Seattle, ended his life recently - seattletimes.nwsource.com/... #sunlight
I think about it whenever I read about a suicide, which is often and way too often. #sunlight
We live in a society where depression, WAY too often, is seen as just a mood or a feeling. #sunlight
Or if it is diagnosed, depression is seen as something to be ashamed of. A dirty secret. A hidden infection. #sunlight
That shame, of course, makes it worse. Makes the person with the disease feel like an outcast. Compounds the problem. #sunlight
And that is screwy, my Twitter friends. Because then people don’t get the help they need. #sunlight

And then sometimes they die. #sunlight
If you broke your leg, you’d go to the hospital. If you have depression you need to get help. #sunlight

These are all things I’ve been saying for years. You might have heard me before. I’ll say them again. One of my things. #sunlight
But the truth is, I haven’t done all I could do. I haven’t been forthcoming. I haven’t lied but I haven’t told the whole truth. #sunlight
The truth is that I’ve been living with the disease of depression for many years. #sunlight
I haven’t been public about that for many reasons. As a sorta public person, I don’t always know where to draw the private line. #sunlight

But as I’ve encouraged people to put their own mental health in the #sunlight, it felt increasingly dishonest not to do the same.
I was diagnosed by a doctor within seconds of arriving in his office. A great deal of evaluation and testing confirmed it. #sunlight
There have been times it tore at me pretty bad. Affected my family and those around me. #sunlight
For a while now, I have been aggressive about treating it and have found a management strategy that is working for me. #sunlight
That balance of treatment took me quite a while to find. #sunlight
I am not blissed out all the time. I have a full range of emotions. I have the same spectrum a regular person has. #sunlight
And there have been times when I’ve been on no medication or the wrong medication and boy things are bad. #sunlight
But I want people to know that depression, like a lot of chronic diseases, can be managed. #sunlight
Some people have an easier time managing it, others a harder time, but you don’t have to give up. #sunlight
I have this disease and I can have a great career, have a family, be engaged in the world, and be happy. #sunlight
I have depression but it doesn’t have me. There’s a tiger in my house but I work like hell to secure its cage. #sunlight
There isn’t a real tiger, that’s just a metaphor. Whew! #sunlight
My brother died of depression five years ago today. He treated it with street drugs and shame. That doesn’t work. #sunlight
I want you to know that when I talk about this disease, it’s not just about my brother’s struggle, it’s about mine too. #sunlight
And it’s about your struggle. It’s about #sunlight. If we can cast that disinfectant on this thing, we can help people feel not so alone.
There is strength in numbers. #sunlight
If you want people to know that this is something you live with, if you want to send a big me too, I invite you to use the tag #sunlight
If you're having suicidal thoughts, please call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, 1-800-273-TALK. #sunlight
You can also visit save.org/ #sunlight
***

As if anyone who reads my LJ/DW with any sort of regularity doesn't already know it, depression has been a huge part of my life, for as long as I can remember, really. Particularly true recently, after a long, blessedly long period of being relatively stable and (mostly) happy (is that what that feeling was?). The past few months have been hellacious, even if I've avoided talking about it. But there have been a few things that have just poked at that whole shell of pain in the past week, cracking it open to life a little bit, and this series of tweets was one of them.

So, I'm sharing. Because it's important. Because my innate tendency is to hide and to run away from it and to pretend it isn't real, it isn't happening. But that's not the way to help things get better. And if I want to be useful and help people in other places (like Haiti) then I need to make sure I'm capable of helping without burying myself even further. Normally I hide away my "omg emo depressed" posts behind f-lock, but that defeats the purpose here, doesn't it? So I'm not gonna. Not gonna lie, it's a bit terrifying, but then again, I have next to no audience, so what the heck? If it helps someone else, it helps, and if it helps me get over the hiding, then it helps.

Four things. Four things in the past week alone.

1) a friend who refused to take silence for an answer
2) letter from Misha in reply to a rather desperate note I gave him (which I haven't mentioned in public, not wanting it to turn into flail-squee)
3) the Rupert Graves quote from the previous post
4) this series of tweets

These four things combined in just the right way at just the right time to get me to act on my worsening depression and get help. So, there you have it. Help comes from the strangest places sometimes, including tumblr and twitter. Yay social media? And of course, as always, yay for the personal touch, whether it be an actual face to face conversation or just a letter.

(Just a letter? Letters can mean so very much. Letters mean someone took time out of their life to sit and write (or type), and stuff an envelope, and pay (omg!) for a stamp.)

(I'd wanted to write letters to people for so long, begging for help, begging for advice, but was always afraid that there would either not be a response or it would be too late...)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are people who are willing to help, even if they don't really know how to do so. Even admitting that there is a problem is freeing somehow, and can make it easier to seek out proper help. If you're the one who is being told by a friend that they're depressed, listen, don't try to problem-solve for them necessarily. Ask them what you can do to help them; sometimes they won't know, sometimes it'll be dead simple and you won't think it's particularly helpful, but it is. Even if it's just letting them know that you can see them, that you know they exist. Maybe you don't know what to say, but that's okay. Maybe that's when you need to LISTEN.

Jumping off my soapbox now.

Sunlight.