depression comix

Story/Art © 2017 Clay

219 "In a very deep pit"

Published 42 Comments

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  3. Jay, this is why I *try* to don’t judge people, but just understand them. This situation is what lead me to a general sense of compassion. We would like others to behave in the same way towards us.

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  7. When you’ve been depressed for so long, it gets to that point when you find it difficult to accept positivity or even help from others, which makes it harder to get out. Maybe not for all, but for some.

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  9. Realizing the best answer to “I don’t understand [insert mental illness and or chronic pain issue here]” was a heartfelt, non-sarcastic, “I’m glad you don’t understand” has helped me a lot.

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  11. I had a friend who expressed disgust, one night, for a coworker whose funeral he was to attend. The man had committed suicide. My friend, like most people, had no understanding of the despair his coworker must have experienced. He thought his associate weak, or cowardly. Your comic illustrates the point awfully well.

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  12. I’ve always thought this about ppl who don’t understand how you can reach to this point. It’s not about why you feel this way so much as actually feeling this way. The pain is unrelenting.

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  14. Having lived with clinical depression and GAD for most of my life, I have come to realise that people genuinely do not understand yet they somehow want to help.
    Of course, that equates to my not understanding the physical and psychological pain of terminal cancer and still trying my best to help my late husband… and failing miserably.

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  15. I’ve spent a number of strips trying to describe why someone would want to commit suicide. I understand it seems unfathomable to most people, and that’s a good thing. But I’ve been trying to explain so that we can get past words like “cowardly”, “running away”, “stupid”, and “selfish”. Although it’s comforting to try to explain the behavior with these terms, it’s just not the truth. Because of this, we can easily dismiss suicidal behavior as a personality flaw and blame the victim for being so weak.
    There have been a number of attempts to explain the self-destructive behavior of suicide here and elsewhere. David Foster Wallace has a very good description, talking about suicide being like trapped in a burning building from which you jump; the bypassers can’t see the flames but see the jump in puzzlement. Allie Brosh talked about it not being about wanting to die but not wanting to live. There are others, and we the depressed nod our heads in acknowledgement having been there, but those who haven’t don’t get the metaphor and remain steadfast of their views of suicide being under lucid control.
    One goal of depression comix is to not describe depression in terms only the depressed can understand due to their experience; I want to try to make a comic that explains the feelings to those who don’t have experience. Complicated, verbose metaphors and word play won’t help, it has to be simple and direct. I’m not saying that comics like this one are completely effective, but I do think I am getting there, slowly.
    I also have to draw a fine line that so these comics aren’t misconstrued as advocating suicide. I definitely don’t want to do that. But I do want us to get past our prejudices and see suicidal behavior for what it is — the result of an illness called depression. Maybe once we can say it’s not a personality defect and a true illness we can get on with the work of trying to actually help those in need instead of accusing them.

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    • I’ve heard it phrased like this: People who suffer chronic pain are willing to do all kinds of drastic things in order to make it stop. They’ll sign up for radical surgeries, take dangerous drugs, even have parts of their bodies removed.

      If the source of pain is your brain and the locus of pain is your entire life…

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    • That’s the way I’ve tried to describe it to an outsider: to get them to turn the order of the question around, from “What was so bad about his/her life that s/he’d want to commit suicide?” to “S/he committed suicide; what must have been so horrible in his/her life?” It turns it from a Judgement on the person, into a realization on how bad depression really is.

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    • If you meet a short dude with furry feet and a glowing blue sword, just show him the way out and let him keep your precious. Trust me, you’re better off without it. 🙂

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  23. I must say, it’s true, you can’t really question someone with suicidal tendencies, because we can’t see the world how they do.

    How about someone that killed himself just because of one mishap?

    My brother killed himself. Why? He had a wonderful life, he just couldn’t see it. My parents allowed him to do a lot of stuff, but didn’t fully support him.
    He wanted to take on drums? They bought him a kit.
    He wanted to use a mohawk? They allowed him, but were of dissaproval.
    He wanted to dress in a certain fashion? They allowed him that too, but didn’t like it.

    Everytime he did something wrong, he wanted an excuse to say “everyone is against me!”. Of course, Everyone was, because he never wanted to understand what the actual FUCK was wrong with what he did or said. He knew he was wrong in many, many things. But when someone tried to explain him, he just went full asshole and never gave two shits about it.
    He used to say that technology was against him, “they want to drive me nuts!” he said. He also used to talk to the gadgets, he felt like they had a life on their own.
    He also liked to complain about internet going off several times in a row.

    But that was it, nobody was against him, he used to use defective technology.

    Then, he got a girlfriend, and he was happy, but he used that to tell someone how shitty familiars were we. Shitty? Us? We wanted him to be FUCKING happy, but he always treated us like shit! And we were the shitty familiars anyways.

    She left him not long ago, and he couldn’t take it anymore. He killed himself?

    Why? Shit I dunno. Suicidal people are telling us “you can’t judge us if you aren’t in our position.”

    So what’s that position again? Because you guys don’t know either.

    You want us to understand? Fine, understand yourself first, and THEN judge other people for not being able to do that.

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    • “So what’s that position again? Because you guys don’t know either.”

      The position is the bottom of the pit, utterly convinced you’ll never escape, despite the cheerful reassurances of many, and the browbeating and guilt-mongering of some.

      “You want us to understand? Fine, understand yourself first, and THEN judge other people for not being able to do that.”

      No one here claimed that non-depressives are unable to understand us as people, just that they can’t understand what it’s like to be stuck in the bottom of the pit. Of course not; how could they? It would be like expecting non-amputees to understand what phantom limb syndrome feels like. But that doesn’t mean non-amputees are incapable of understanding amputees as people. Amputees are far more than their physical disability; depressives are far more than their mental one.

      But it does mean that non-amputees are not in position to judge whether phantom limb syndrome is real, and genuinely troubling. Similarly, non-depressives are not in position to judge the suicidal impulses (and sometimes, actions) of the severely depressed.

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      • I am a non-amputee with phantom pain from nerve damage, so don’t go making blanket statements. One of the most dangerous situations for me is a phantom itch in my sleep. This is because while I can force myself to not scratch an itch while I am awake I can’t not scratch the itch while I am asleep, and I have awakened to bloody sheets and a hole in my leg from sleep scratching at an itch that won’t go away from just scratching. I have also been nearly knocked down with pains that have no physical causes and won’t go away with pain relievers.

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        • If I’d written something like “non-amputees can’t possibly understand what phantom limb syndrome is like,” then yes, that would have been a blanket statement. But that’s not what I wrote. I said it’s unreasonable to *expect* a non-amputee to understand what phantom limb syndrome feels like. Similarly, it’s unreasonable to expect someone who has never experienced suicidal depression to understand what it’s like. As the strip points out, that’s a good thing.

          Please also note the second to last sentence: “it does mean that non-amputees are not in position to judge whether phantom limb syndrome is real, and genuinely troubling.” Similarly, people like me who have never experienced phantom itch are in no position to judge whether it’s a real phenomenon. It’s real to you and many others, and that’s what matters.

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  30. … At the bottom, I try to climb, but after going a few tremulous steps up, the rocks I’m holding or stepping on crumble and I just fall back to the bottom again. Some days, I ask myself, “Why bother?” and just curl up.

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  31. I had a breakthrough as a teenager, compliments of Dumas – in The Count of Monte Cristo, Edmond’s imprisonment was my depression, and prisons were both internal, and external.

    I may not be able to climb out, but I’m gonna damned well make myself comfortable down here, I decided…and started cutting things out of my life, and replacing them with ways to occupy my time that did me no harm. That, and a fairly regimented life? kept me going long enough to find better answers.

    for the rest of my life, I’m going to be looking over my shoulder, sure…but I get to have the rest of my life.

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  32. This is old, and I haven’t dealt with this level of depression in a very, very long time, but…

    This is why I get mad at those people who insist that suicides go to hell. When you’re suicidal, your entire life is hell, and you don’t know how to get out except to kill yourself, but then people will have to clean up the mess, and what if you fail and get committed and then you’ll NEVER, NEVER get out, and and and…

    And so, for another day, you survive, believing that nobody could ever love you. Even as a devout Catholic, I believed that I was too broken for even Jesus to love. That I would need to purge the sin from me with blood. My blood. And if it killed me, hey, that’s how it is. I literally would stop flossing for several weeks, just so I could have the (totally invisible to others, so they didn’t have to know my shame) absolution of the pain and blood on the day I started again. (On a similar note, just because I have never intentionally cut myself doesn’t mean I wasn’t self-destructive back then. A clever depressed person can figure out ways to cause themselves pain that won’t show.)

    I consider myself one of the lucky ones. Turns out, my depression was related to hormone levels, so I haven’t been anywhere near suicidal since I’ve been on the Pill. But oh, I can remember the constant dull ache all the time.

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