Often they sit with their fears alone and fighting to free themselves from them, losing their perspective and tragically can harm themselves and those they love, it needn’t be physical harm, a mental one will do just as well. The urge to climb out of their skin becomes intense yet they lay lethargically and completely immobilized. This urge is constant, demoralizing and destructive.
No amount of coaxing, cajoling, urging, or begging from relatives or friends will release them from their torment as they stare down the emptiness of their despair. They seem determined to what looks like making themselves unhappy when they are at their most desperate, seeking a release mechanism that will catapult them into the sunlight once again. But to an outsider, it can’t be understood.
The harsh reality of it all affects their loved ones as they try to penetrate the shield or is it the mental iron curtain of despair? No movement, no hope, no understanding, just the endless days of gloom and loneliness pervade their world, gray and saddened.
Recently, in New York City, a father suffering from depression while holding his 5-year old daughter leaped in front of an on coming subway train as it entered a station killing him but thank God the child was spared. Those who witnessed the event mustered together to help the child trapped under the train. Two good Samaritans jumped down onto the track and helped the child out from under the train. Her little hands were alive crawling out from under the car and crying: “Papi, Papi!”
The man was separated from his wife, an event that does occur with alarming frequency but understandably. Some of us can’t deal with other’s depression, our strength is challenged and some of us embrace it for the love of the depressed, kind of selfishly holding onto the hands of the sufferers as they precariously swing over the side of the great abyss.
I’m no expert on depression, just an observer of it, grateful that I don’t seem to suffer from it and thankful to be able to rally behind those who do. But like I say, I am not an expert and so I fear for all those who do need help and have only me there to buffer their despair from some inevitable result so horrific as to turn my heart to shreds and my soul to tears.
When I read the article in the newspaper of the father and his little girl, it moved me to tears. Tears for a father who did love his child yet his mind so broken as to carry that child over the platform edge into the coming train. His wife said he was a loving father who phoned her before this act of desperation to tell her to take care of his kids, then he jumped.
We need more money poured into mental health and less into building unnecessary walls, we need more money taken away from wasteful spending and pour it into mental health. No one should have to hang from the abyss. We need to understand what mental depression does and how it harms not only the sufferer but, the family and friends who fear for them. Life should be a joy to live in spite of the pitfalls and trauma it does offer as it is, without the added trauma of mental disabilities that are rooting into our society. We need to slap the politicians silly until they understand what their duty and functions are, to provide good life and safety to all.
No comments:
Post a Comment