Depression Against Life

Posted by JohnD Sun, 30 Mar 2008 22:25:00 GMT

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WARNING: THIS POST HAS POSSIBLE TRIGGERS

Anon for Now recently commented on the sense of renewal in life that served as a deterrent to suicide. This struck me as capturing the most baffling aspect of the temptation to end life. For what does the evidence of life on earth point to but the endlessly inventive will to survive? There is no more fundamental drive than the will to adapt, change, reproduce one’s kind under any circumstances. Yet so many in the grip of major depression or bipolar depression act against that drive toward life and destroy themselves. As Kay Redfield Jamison points out in Night Falls Fast, the presence of mental illness and/or substance abuse, or worse, the two together, vastly increases the likelihood of suicide. It’s among the top five causes of death in the United States for men and women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four.

What I have seen and sorrowed at is the cool determination of more than one friend to plan and carry out his own destruction. Karl Menninger described the drive to suicide as taking many forms in his classic study, Man Against Himself. These included self-defeating behavior, dangerous addictions, certain types of self-mutilation, aggressive and violent outbursts, purposive accidents and many other variations. Some of these can lead directly to premature death; many set the stage in a person’s mind as justification for ending a life regarded as failed or too painful or destructive to others.

Posted in What Depression Can Do, Fighting Depression, Men and Depression | Tags alcoholism, contempt, depression, Karl Menninger, Kay Redfield Jamison, life, Man Against Himself, Night Falls Fast, self, shame, suicide | 4 comments