DEPRESSION

Almost everyone has made a joke about being depressed at some point. It has become common nowadays for people to exclaim, “Ugh, I’m going to kill myself!” when a minor inconvenience occurs. People talk about being depressed when their favorite Netflix show has been cancelled. I’ve seen tweets about wanting to “end it all” or Snapchat stories about being so depressed because life wasn’t working out the way they had wanted it to. I was guilty of doing this, too. A couple years ago, though, something happened that changed my usage of these phrases. 

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A close friend at my dance studio was the happiest person that I knew. She always wanted to be at dance, told stories in the most lively way, and genuinely cared about how we all were doing. She was always laughing and kept the rest of us giggling as well. She was our sunshine. Every year, Wayne State University held a Ballet Day for the Cecchetti Council of America which is the council that my dance studio belonged to. It was a day full of master classes and auditions, and since my dance teacher ran it, all of her students were expected to go. My friends and I all got there hours in advance, anticipating that everyone would be there. An hour passed by and we noticed that our friend hadn’t shown up yet. We asked her best friend where she was and she almost burst into tears; our dear sunshine had written suicide notes and her mother found them. I was in complete shock. How could someone who was so happy, so bubbly be depressed? I always knew that depression was a real concern, but I had never experienced suicide first hand like that. It’s different watching a news report of a celebrity falling into depression’s grasp, but when it happens to someone you love, it feels too real, too close to home. 

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When she came back to dance after a week, we drowned her in our love, making sure that she knew that she had a family at dance when her family at home wasn’t supportive. My jokes about wanting to off myself or being so depressed dwindled, knowing that comments like those were not okay to make, especially around her. We all made sure to be cautious with what we said and how we phrased things, not wanting to upset her. As the years went by, our sunshine came back more and more, but any time she seemed slightly off, we rushed to her side to assure her that everything would be okay and that she is so loved. 

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Depression is more common than most people think. I have had multiple friends of mine tell me that at some point, they were diagnosed with depression or some sort of depressive disorder. We constantly see in the news how celebrities pass away from suicide or how young people commit suicide after being tortured at school. Depression surrounds us daily, and because of shared vocabulary, it can be thrown to the way-side. People who joke about being depressed or wanting to off themselves make it difficult to tell who may actually be suffering. It becomes more challenging to tell what the warning signs are that someone may be having suicidal thoughts. These phrases have become so normalized that it’s often seen as a joke, as seen in the tweets above. People believe that depression is something that is funny and relatable, so they post things like this to receive the most amount of likes and attention.