awritersruminations:

I’ve been reading about the writer David Foster Wallace, a writer that I had never heard of until recently. In the last year of his life he was consumed by depression after quitting the medication that had stablilized him for two decades. One day, when his wife left their house, he hung himself….

As someone who was diagnosed with major depression, and has been on anti-depressants for the last two years, thank you.

Also a problem is the burgeoning trend that glamourises depression, or being a so-called ‘tortured soul’. Suddenly, it’s become cool to be ‘fucked-up’ or neurotic. Let me tell you that it isn’t - not when you put your family through hell with your irritable moods or total apathy and anhedonia. Not when you lose most of your friends because they believe you to be a slacker, or melodramatic, and because you can’t leave the house without becoming hysterical with panic, no matter how much you try to control your breathing, or ‘think of the bigger picture’. Not when you’re flat broke because you had to stop working, and you left school, despite good grades, and you have no idea how you’ll ever accumulate the money to travel, or get admitted to university. Not when you spend most of your days fighting a mixture of self-pity, guilt for being self-piteous, and self-loathing. Resentment towards the world for not understanding, and resentment towards yourself for expecting it to. Confusion, because you really don’t know what causes these bottomless wells of sorrow in your head. Frustration, because you know that you should just go out and live your life the best you can, it doesn’t really matter, one person’s suffering, not when there’s so much other suffering in the world, but somehow you just can’t bring yourself to.

It’s not cool, it’s just sad.