The Marasmus of Depression

Real depression doesn't come from one source. Part of it is inherited. In my own family it ran through my mother and my grandmother. On top of that, there's everything that gets poured into a person from the outside: the criticism, the put-downs, the slow erosion of self-worth until insecurity becomes the default setting.

Think about how far this can go. A person of faith can end up hating themselves so completely that suicide starts to look like a trade, their life handed over so that someone else might be spared.

That kind of thinking treats a human being as less than nothing. Somewhere along the line you absorbed the belief that no one's approval was available to you, not even your own, and after that every setback read like proof. The problem is you never let yourself grieve any of those losses and move forward. Instead the pain curled inward and turned suicidal.

Depression, and the suicide it sometimes leads to, is a closed road. The depressed person walks it convinced they're walking alone, certain that no one would notice their absence and half-convinced no one should. That belief feels like simple fact from the inside.

There's an old line that depression is anger pointed back at the self. When that anger finally snaps outward, the person can pull others down with them, sometimes one, sometimes many. Bleak to even write.

Someone who dies this way may tell themselves it won't be for nothing, that the people left behind will finally carry a piece of the hurt they carried. I'm not defending any of this. I'm saying it happens, and afterward everyone stands around asking how.

Put a chemical imbalance together with isolation, with the sense of being unwanted and having nowhere to set any of it down, and the mix can turn fatal. The absence of an outlet is part of what makes it so dangerous.

A spell of it can lift. But it behaves like a post-traumatic flashback, able to surge back with no warning, and it tends to pick the moments when a person is by themselves and least able to fight it.

Getting through depression takes an enormous amount of support, and the people living inside it are usually sure that support isn't coming. Some hide how fragile they are for the plain reason that they are fragile. Round and round it goes. A genuine Catch-22.

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