Why do people think suicide from depression is any more preventable than death from cancer?

Depression kills, like many diseases. There are steps we can take to prevent ourselves from falling headlong into the abyss, in the same way we can drink green tea, walk half hour daily and drink red wine to help prevent the big C. Therapy, rehab and better social supports can all help, but like all these lifestyle changes, sometimes they only go so far. When a depressed person thinks they have no option but to kill themselves, there is not much that will change their mind.

When the world and all its demons conspire to take someone’s life, there is nothing anyone can do. Simply being a bit nicer to someone with a death wish isn’t going to stop them. If your worldview is set at bleak at best, money fame, talent and wealth can’t save you.

There are as many factors that impinge on suicide as any other “preventable” illness. Genes, lifestyle choices (although I query who much control any of us really has over the daily ephemera that amount to a lifetime, each of us puppeteered by the grid of factors that make us exist in space and time) entwine with who we are and have become, why and how we got here – our relationships with people and our ability to fit in to the social constructs we are often shoehorned into, in this alien world of our own and noone’s making.

Add to that expectation, loss of anonymity, possible medical conditions, the decline and implicit loss of value in aging, and addiction – a symptom, not a cause – the chicken or the egg? I would say the chicken is the egg and the egg only really exists in our minds anyway- and it’s hardly surprising the famous depressed are dropping like flies.

Depression is an evil that gnaws at the soul, darkening our worldview with the shutters of narrow-mindedness and myopia – it can only be described as poetry because it is so ephemeral, so hormonal, so symptomatic, it can not be described accurately enough for many to believe it even exists- our moods fluctuating like weather yet constrained by the poles of our personalities. There is no way out for the nihilist. Even smoking is suicide by the back door. We all know it.

So judge if you will, happy people with your contentedness and optimism. But lose your smugness. You did not make it yourselves anymore than the sad, nor the brave, nor the powerful. We are products of the universe, nothing more, nothing less. So save your shock. There never was any other way for it to end than this.