[asie]

As somebody who has cancer, mentioned in the article and mentioned right next to diabetes (cringe), I look at the people complaining about how human interaction is complicated and life is difficult and I am left speechless.

Fuck people, make an effort. Do it for the dying ones.

[ANTSANTS]

That portion of the article is referring to clinical depression, not general loneliness and unhappiness. You just demonstrated his point (that people have a hard time seeing mental conditions like bipolar disorders as actual diseases of the mind and not just bad attitudes) quite nicely.

Pardon me for being frank, but when I pause to imagine having my life taken from me before I was done living it, or being so profoundly unhappy that I would sincerely attempt to kill myself, I can only see both as terrible in their own right. There's no sense in trying to compare the severity of one to the other.

[asie]

Your life is not "taken from me before you're done living it".

You get to keep it. For a while at least.

[pavs]

> Fuck people, make an effort. Do it for the dying ones.

I think this is exactly what Stephen was referring to, most people don't understand clinical depression, including yourself, it seems.

At least with something like cancer you can tell for sure whether you will live or not or for how long you will suffer. With clinical depression, even if diagnosed and medicated most people suffer as long as they are alive, and some people will even try to hide for fear of people constantly trying to be in their face with advice and overtly concerns. Similar to what Stephen is facing, which makes me wonder if he trying to hide it...

[veridies]

> At least with something like cancer you can tell for sure whether you will live or not or for how long you will suffer

Not even close to true and immensely insulting to claim.

[eshvk]

Life is difficult. People feel their problems are insurmountable; "make an effort" feels like an American cheerleading thing. Sometimes, it is not really about the effort; if it was, you could get rid of therapists and SSRIs and tell people to run around the block a few times.

Also, everyone is dying. Your illness has made you more aware of it; how people accept death is the question.

[Crake]

For some people, depression is terminal.

The world would be a much better place if people understood this. (Incidences of terminal depression might decrease, too.)

[vacri]

"Fuck people, make an effort"? What do you think Fry's essay was? Did you read it past the bit you didn't like at the start?

Instead of focusing on the few words of the essay about what affects you, why not focus on the torrent of words about what affects Fry? In other words, 'make an effort'.

[lfuller]

This just shows an ignorance of the issues being discussed here. The issue is not that "human interaction is complicated and life is difficult", it's that his feelings - and the feelings of many others - are the result mental illness.

This is a serious health issue - equally as serious as cancer.

[cranefly]

Cancer frightens me very much. How are things going for you?

[asie]

I'm 25. I was fit. Never smoked. Eat healthy. Got a PhD. In two months I developed a stage 4 carcinoma. I was told in a routine check-up.

About diagnosis, the hardest part is not when they tell _you_. Well, it is not a walk in the park to get told that good chances are you won't turn 30, but your day is about to get worse. The hardest part is to go home. Tell your gf - the one you where thinking of proposing to - that you're sick - while she says tearing that you look perfectly fine and you need to explain that on the inside you are not.

I told my gf to run away from me when I was diagnosed - I really hope she is fine. I have been told I am a selfish bastard and that decision was not for me to take and many other unpleasant things. I shrug. I went through 2 surgeries, chemo and radio. They have put more that 100 metal stitches in me. I had tubes running in places I never thought it was possible. I have attempted in pain to drink morphine because I had no more needles to inject myself. It's been hard and the way I am, if I'm going to drawn in shit I won't bring down with me the ones I love. I stand by my decision and despite I deeply care about her, I'll have to do without her, because I really believe she deserves better.

Then you need to talk to your (aging) parents. Fix one day. Yeah mum dinner is fine. No she won't come I'll be there alone. She's busy. Don't worry. No reason. --- Fun talk.

The doctor told me this disease would break me down. Therapy is almost as hard as the disease itself. The people next to you really make the difference. A good psychiatrist is also very important.

I am alive, but I am not the same living being.

Everything changes.

[cranefly]

I am a lot older than you and i had a scare once. That was bad enough but i can only imagine what you must be going through. Knowing the little i do about how medicine works in my country can i just suggest that you be as assertive as you can be, do your research, ask pertinent questions and show them you're not just a number and keep them on their toes and go elsewhere if you're not satisfied. I don't think you are selfish, I hope you get through this. I would very much like to know how you get on, if you have a blog or something. I'm not religious but 'God Bless' seems to say best what i want to say to you.

[jongraehl]

If it matters to you (of course it's tangential to the article), I sympathize more with those who face death before 50 due to random events, than those who suffer depression (though it's often equally morally blameless - essentially random accidents of brain chemistry). Depressed folk at least have a realistic hope of treatments that will give them some remaining years in life that they would choose over death.

Good luck w/ your life, and it sounds like you really care about her. Hope you can tell her you love her or whatever at some point without feeling guilty about it harming her (then again, I'm sure she knows).

[heurist]

Depression (and other forms mental illness) isn't as fatal as diabetes or cancer but it is fatal for many people and ruins the lives of even more.

[EvanKelly]

Depression (specifically Bipolar disorder, since it's the disorder I'm most educated on) is almost certainly as fatal as diabetes and more fatal than many forms of cancer.

1 in 3 sufferers of Bipolar disorder attempt suicide and 1 in 5 eventually die from suicide. Clinical depression is a very fatal disease.

[electronvolt]

I'm sorry that you have cancer. It's a terrible disease that nearly took a parent from me (it had metastasized before it was caught; my mother was incredibly lucky). I don't intend to trivialize it by any means, but I do think it's important to compare it to something like bipolar disorder.

Malignant cancer will probably either be dealt with or kill you on a time scale of 5-10 years, and although mortality rates vary, your chances of surviving many forms of it, particularly if it's caught before it metastasizes, are decent. Yes, there's a chance that it has gone into remission and might come back, but that chance goes down every year it hasn't happened, to the point where you're generally considered 'out of the woods' if you've been cancer free for more than 5 years. It's in many ways an acute disease: you have it, and it either kills you or you get better. Treatment is acutely unpleasant, but unlikely to kill you and although it can leave you with health concerns (if I remember correctly, it can cause osteoporosis in some people), for the most part you are done with it after less than a few years of chemo+radiation therapy.

Compare that to being diagnosed with bipolar disorder at the age of 20. Life expectancy in the US is almost 80. You don't really get better from bipolar disorder: you can be stable for a long time, but you never get to the point where you're considered to be 'out of the woods' with regards to having more mood episodes. That gives 60 years of dealing with a disease that has a high mortality rate and incredibly unpleasant symptoms; mania sounds great until you realize that it can mean experiencing full blown psychosis: walls melting, seeing people where they aren't levels of crazy. About one in three (25% to 50%) of bipolar patients attempt suicide at least once; one in five will die from suicide. As has been pointed out elsewhere, that is a higher death rate than some cancers, and that is -one of- the ways it can kill you.

The treatments, too, although not as immediately unpleasant as chemotherapy, are honestly potentially worse and cause more chronic concerns. They can cause other chronic problems that can kill you (liver failure, weight gain, weight loss, diabetes, thyroid dysfunction, lithium toxicity/lithium, weight gain, diabetes, associated heart issues/depakote+antipsychotics, PCOS in women/depakote) or be debilitating (dystonia, tardive dyskinesia/antipsychotics). It should be a sign of the severity of some symptoms that it's considered an acceptable trade off to have muscle spasms or uncontrollable facial movements for the rest of your life, sometimes in ways that are debilitating enough that you won't be able to walk. Note that these aren't the disease, these are the side effects that're considered 'less bad' than experiencing the actual symptoms of bipolar disorder. Many of them are permanent and will continue even if the medication that caused them is stopped.

These are some of the -common- serious side effects, not all of the common side effects (there are lots of other common ones that effect quality of life, including hair loss, sexual dysfunction, memory failure, etc.). With regards to rarer side effects, lamictal can (rarely; 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10000) cause your skin to fall off, particularly if your dose is increased too quickly.

Schizophrenia is generally worse than bipolar disorder, and the treatments are often similar (less lithium, more antipsychotics).

Both are chronic conditions that, when they are bad, can keep you from working, finding housing or living a normal life for however much longer you live.

I wouldn't wish cancer or bipolar disorder or schizophrenia on anyone. But I'd probably wish for cancer over severe bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

[paranoiacblack]

You're just missing the point entirely. Fry isn't setting up Cancer and Diabetes and Depression or suicidal thoughts as equals, but rather as equally likely ailments. "Make an effort" is blaming the victim for something usually out of their control which is similar to blaming you for getting cancer. Imagine if you were telling someone with skin cancer or lung cancer that they should "make an effort" to stay out of the sun or quit cigarettes. You're trivializing the disease that's already there.

And you're not the only one. This is a common attitude people have. It's as if people who really feel detached from this life and want to end it do not have that right. Instead, millions of people would rather sit down and debate whether it's ethical for someone to kill themselves or have a physician-assisted suicide. Maybe we all want to believe that everything is a Hollywood-esque setting where you just need to find the right people and love of your life to get everything back together. In reality, mental illness (cyclothymia, in this case) is just as real as every other illness and you can't just "make an effort" to get rid of it. I'm sorry about your illness, but try to not to trivialize other's, it isn't a competition.

[asie]

I very well understand what you mean. My post came out sounding worse than I intended to and I see everybody jumped the gun and assumed I intended depression=whiny people. This is an answer to everybody.

I didn't.

And of course I did not mean "snap out of it", which is bullshit and we all know that. Nor I intended to say that a disease is worse that the other (being un-PC, it might be, but how do you judge that? by which standards? and isn't it a futile exercise?).

Every human being deserves respect, and that includes respecting their illness.