How to Understand Someone Who Is Depressed

I guess I understand why people don't want to know the truth and don't share the truth. Sometimes the real truth is too true; it's too raw; it's too real.

There's that fear that people who don't know what it's like to be depressed will freak out by what you say.

If I were to be truthful right now, I would say the thought that is going through my head on a loop is—I want to kill myself.

But I know you know you can't say that. You can't share a sentence like that in front of people who don't know depression.

You don't want the police showing up at your door in five minutes.

Just because the thought is there, haunting you, it doesn't mean you're actually going to kill yourself; it just means you're preoccupied by the thought.

But some people may question, Well, how do I know if she is serious or not?

For many people who deal with depression, it's when he or she says I am going to kill myself that one should worry, not I want to kill myself.

It is not semantics; there is a big difference. One is a haunting viral thread running through your brain and the other is an act you're about to commit.

I am not about to kill myself, but the loop is playing and it's hard to escape and it makes me sad if I can’t express it and let it out.

Sometimes I just yearn to be understood and to be loved just the way I am.  

Pro-anorexia Sites Not So Bad After All?

Interesting article by Amanda Hess abut pro-anorexia sites on Slate: Let Them Blog: The panic over pro-anorexia websites and social media isn’t healthy.

The consensus has been that these sites are dangerous and triggering for those with eating disorders. The sites often give thinspiration or “thinspo” tips and photos, basically encouraging people’s eating disorders as a lifestyle instead of as an illness.

Pro-ana blogs are easier to understand when you stop seeing them as propaganda organs and start viewing them as expressions of mental illness. In a paper published last year, psychotherapist Tom Wooldridge describes one patient with anorexia who used pro-ana blogging as “a psychic retreat” where she could “withdraw from overwhelming emotional pain.” Some sites are less autobiographical diaries and more portraits of anorexia itself: Posting thigh gap after thigh gap to Tumblr helps some girls release the pressure of the images that anorexia pounds relentlessly into their heads. One pro-ana blogger, who blogs under the handle AnaGirl Empath, cautions that pro-ana’s more extreme manifestations are “creative alliterations” that should not be “interpreted literally.” As the French sociologist Antonio Casilli put it last year, “Criminalizing these websites means [criminalizing] mental illness—a double burden for sufferers.” 

This change in focus could be healthy for those who suffer from any kind of mental illness, not just eating disorders.

If more sufferers felt free to write their experiences in any way that comes naturally to them while they are in the throes of an illness, how therapeutic that could be.

For the readers searching for tips on fasting and getting thinner, all they need to do is go to just about any Internet site.

Perhaps the harm is coming from somewhere else...