These maudlin portraits of suicides make me sick. They always follow the same script. Missed warning signs, attempts at help, wasted potential and a quick peek at the family's grief. And this one is even worse with the little one sentence stings at the end of the sections that are supposed to be weighty but come off as inappropriately saccharine. I can see the soft focus lens of sentimentality fall over every mental image as I read. It's emotional junk food that makes people think saying, "What a shame," for five seconds is a touching tribute before moving on to the next distraction. The problem with this shit is the necessity of a news story is to provide a narrative when killing yourself due to clinical depression has no understandable story that anyone can follow except for what's inside the head of the victim and she's gone. You get some naive copywriter to try to fill in a story, create a empathetic pathway for the reader who is probably just as clueless about the difference between major depression and situational sadness and you're left with a few snapshots that get spit shined with some sympathy and a complete lack of understanding. I can honestly say if I read something like this written about me (uplifting, what's wrong, you have so much. not the death part) in an attempt to make me feel better while I was in the midst of a depressive episode it would make me angry and probably make me want to kill myself all the more. If you have a serious mental illness, you're effectively isolated. Your brain did it, no one's going to be able to say or do anything to fix it and your brain, with maybe some lithium, is going to get you out of it. Or not. If you've never been seriously depressed, psychotic, anxiety stricken, what you get when you talk about it is the other person telling you when they've felt that way when they've never even been in the ballpark. Or hemisphere relative to the ballpark. It takes a serious effort for someone outside these diseases to care enough to try to understand what it's like. These types of articles are simplified to the point of uselessness. We get these tributes after an actor or pretty white girl dies and the average reader takes it as the kind of awareness of a problem that they should be proud of because it said "stigma of mental illness'"somewhere in the body of the article which made them feel good about a cause. A cause no one is doing anything about in earnest. There's an awful lot of these maudlin, feature length obituaries written though.
If the outcome of this type of story is that someone says, "what a shame," and then hugs their child a little tighter, calls their sister or contemplates their own mental state for a brief moment, then I'd say there's value there. Even if a new distraction comes along. Twenty years ago, the idea of deoression being a real and valid disease wasn't much appreciated. Each story like this inches society closer to this understanding. Do we as a society fall shamefully short of addressing this disease? Hell yes. All the more reason to write about it imo.
i never suggested that hugs save lives but rather that there is value in such a story beyond "saving lives." Also, I'd wager that more than once a hug has actually saved a life. In no way am I diminishing the seriousness of clinical depression but I'm also not willing to suggest that this article or others like it are completely vapid.
What makes you the designated speaker for depression and mental illness?
In light of where some of this thread has gone, I want to be really clear here, I value what you wrote here. It's a perspective that I, thankfully, have little experience with. I validate that I've never "been in the ballpark," and I doubt the author has either. I'm glad you shared your perspective, it's worthwhile to note how an article like this can seem opportunistic to someone that has been in the ballpark. Thanks.
Enjoy your conversations, wherever they may be. I don't think I said anything stupid anywhere in this thread, and stand by my comments. We have different perspectives and as such the article elicited different emotional responses. It is what it is.
I agree, I didn't see it as anything other than a way she projected what she thought was expected of her. No different than wearing clean clothes and putting on a smile. Not once did I feel like social media was being portrayed as a "bad guy."
It seemed to me as if social media and the expectations that it creates in youth were brought in as potential factors. Of course, in reality, they may not have been - in order to make a sequence of jumbled events hang together in the, as you've observed, forced narrative structure, it's important to identify certain threads which can be used to tie the story together. Instagram and social media was clearly highlighted as one of those uniting lines. Villain? No. Let's not be so absolute.