I'm also going to paste an excerpt that I feel describes depression better than anything else I've ever come across. From the brilliant David Foster Wallace (another 'funny guy' who killed himself because he just couldn't take it any longer, RIP):
...
"The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant.
The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really.
You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."
Yes, that sounds like a reasonable explanation of it.
Everybody suffers from some form of depression at various times. The only difference is how well they cope with it.
Clinical depression isn't just something to come out of though. It follows you around, stays with you, and then it starts to become a companion. It's always there, even when it feels like no one else is. It's a permanent part of who you are, or indeed it begins to feel as though it
is who you are. Thus getting rid of the depression would mean, in a sense, killing yourself. Maybe not physiologically terminating your own life, but destroying the only part left that matters, destroying the only thing that you feel truly represents who you are. Once that's where you are, once that's where you exist, taking your own life can feel like a mere formality. You're already dead, but you just have to suffer through it every day.
It's a place in which
no one should ever have to live.
But mental health problems scare people, something along the lines of cancer.
We can handle something like a severely broken bone or a bloody gash on someone's arm. That's visible. It makes sense to our primate brains.
Cancer destroys you at the cellular level.
Mental problems are your brain tearing itself apart.
They're invisible threats, and at some level, they terrify us. In the case of mental health problems, we as a society largely try to bury them and pretend they'll just go away.
).
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