{"id":11836,"date":"2021-10-13T19:07:48","date_gmt":"2021-10-14T02:07:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=11836"},"modified":"2021-10-25T01:42:12","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T08:42:12","slug":"suicide-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/?p=11836","title":{"rendered":"Suicide Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"font-style: italic ;\">&#91;I posted the following as an entry to <a hrefF=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/\">Facebook<\/a> six years ago.&#93;<\/p> <p>Every now and then, one of my Facebook Friends posts or comments to a posting about someone who has lost his battle with depression.<\/p> <p>I recently saw one of those postings, and visited the page of the person who was said to have lost the battle. I saw his some of his final posts, and some of his pictures. And, yeah, he was battling with depression. If I'd know him, I would have told him to stop.<\/p> <p>I don't mean that I would have told him to go somewhere and die. I mean that depression is not to be <em>fought<\/em>. I very much <em>doubt<\/em> that a depressive personality can ever be anything else; but I am absolutely <em>certain<\/em> that <em>fighting<\/em> it is not how to deal with it.<\/p> <p>People who try to <em>fight<\/em> depression either are always <em>fighting<\/em> it or have <em>lost<\/em> to it. They <em>compound<\/em> the depression with a sense that there is something <em>unacceptable<\/em> about themselves, which can only be overcome by a <em>fight<\/em>. If they don't have that much <em>fight<\/em> in themselves, then they don't accept themselves; their lives hang on their belief in their ability to <em>fight<\/em> depression, to somehow <em>refuse<\/em> to be depressives.<\/p> <p>It looks an awful lot like an unrecognized <em>internalization<\/em> of some of the things that the depressive was told as a child, by those who were failing that child, and who in many cases had taught and were teaching the perverted life-lessons that had made the child a depressive.<\/p> <p>Depression is to be <em>explained<\/em>, to be <em>understood<\/em>, and to be put in <em>context<\/em>. There is no guarantee that life will then be livable, but at least one doesn't have to die upon losing a <em>fight<\/em>.<\/p> ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#91;I posted the following as an entry to Facebook six years ago.&#93; Every now and then, one of my Facebook Friends posts or comments to a posting about someone who has lost his battle with depression. I recently saw one of those postings, and visited the page of the person who was said to have [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,318,5,4],"tags":[552,300],"class_list":["post-11836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-ethics-philosophy","category-personal","category-public","tag-psychological-depression","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11836"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11846,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11836\/revisions\/11846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oeconomist.com\/blogs\/daniel\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}