January 27th, 2012. Day 27.

I recently recalled a particularly nasty anonymous message I received last year RE: my mental state. The gist of the message basically went, “if you were really suicidal you wouldn’t talk about it” “my friend killed himself and nobody had any idea he was struggling” “you’re not depressed you’re just an attention whore” “cunt” “bitch” “slut” etc.

I mean, if this is your attitude to people admitting they have problems, do you wonder why your friend never told you he wanted to take his own life? If he told you he wanted to die and ended up being brushed off as an attention whore, do you really think he would have thought, “Gee, everyone’s right. I’ll just snap out of this and be happy.”

I don’t like to say I have depression, because in reality I’m a lot better off than most people with mental disorders and I do think the term is thrown around much too loosely these days. But I hate that people can’t understand that it doesn’t just go away. I have a friend whose family has drilled the belief into her head that depression is just a state of mind that you can change. She often tries to make me believe it too.

Let’s say that person A has depression, and person B has diabetes. Person A can’t decide to get better any more than person B can. You can’t just tell someone to stop being depressed any more than you can tell someone to stop being diabetic. It just doesn’t work that way.

I was talking to my mum about this and she agreed with me wholeheartedly, which made me feel a little better. She said that there’s no hope in trying to make these people understand, that it would be like trying to describe purple to someone who’s colourblind. She said, “Some people just can’t see the colour purple.”

I don’t know what the point of this post was. Just that I like the term “the colour purple”, and that this whole topic is really upsetting.