Now I hardly if ever openly discuss my mental health with but a handful, and even that's generous, of people. But I was considerably disturbed by what I read of Matt Walsh's post and his followup insofar that it reeks of ignorance. And I couldn't finish it really riled me the wrong way.
Let me sum it up for those who have not read it, suicide is a choice, this is his position. However what he and countless other people fail to recognize is sure suicide is a choice but its a choice much in the same way the person on PCP who jumped off a building and died had a choice in the matter. By definition that person on PCP committed suicide, but society would never say that was the persons choice, it wouldn't be stigmatized in the same manner. Let me go further the person taking PCP chose to take PCP, the person with mental illness, depression, bipolar and many others; they don't chose these ailments. There is a chasm of difference between a lucid choice and an action that occurs where your rational lucid mind is clouded by an illness.
Being depressed, and so depressed that suicide enters your thoughts as an option (or you actually attempt it) is something that anyone who hasn't been there really cannot grasp. And general societal analogies about tunnel vision don't really adequately describe the experience. Once in college I made this analogy which I think (hope) is fairly accurate, being suicidal is a feeling that is difficult to describe, like for the person who has never been skydiving the rush and feeling of jumping out of an airplane cannot be described, only those who have experienced it can really relate to it. The lowness of suicidal depression is like the rush and the high of jumping out of a plane in that indescribable you have to be there to believe it kind of way.
So I would ask those who have not ever been there to not pass judgement and spew ridiculous propaganda about things to perpetuate a stigma that is devastating to those with mental illness and those who deal with it every day; the paitents, their families and the mental health professionals. If you have an opinion, have an opinion, but please don't present your individual feeling as a factual standpoint or "the absolute truth". Granted opinions get conversations started, extreme opinions get many started but this opinion, I think, is a dangerous one to propagate.
Oh and if you want to read his post, you can google it, I'm not going to link it here.
