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I think you should get help. You either have health insurance now, or you qualify for a lot of government help. Almost everywhere in America now has some kind of mental health intervention. Please, go and look. Do not assume that you won't be able to afford it. Most clinics won't turn you away for that reason anyway. Your depression is like an adversary, trying to kill you, and it is feeding you wrong thoughts. Some of them are obvious, depriving meaning from meaningful things, and some of them are not obvious, like the idea that you cannot get help for one reason or another. But it's just another tactic for your adversary. I would guess that you need some friends. Having a "support network" is important. If you had one, you wouldn't be reaching out to strangers on HN. But, look at it this way—I haven't logged in to leave a comment in a year and a half, and I did for you. And you have two other people leaving comments, so clearly you are interesting enough to make some friends. So I would recommend you try and do that. The rest of my advice is probably useless, but I'll say it anyway. Sometimes when I get depressed I fantasize about going somewhere remote and just living in a cabin or something. I'm sure I'd be awful at it, but you know, if your alternative is killing yourself, you might as well try it. At least that way you can die of something exotic. Would you rather die because you were trying something dangerous in the hopes of enjoying it, or because you decided to call it quits early? Have you tried freighthopping? If you're going to kill yourself, you might as well get a free trip or two out of it. You might as well go down to the dangerous part of town and get into a fight. You might as well, I dunno, get an awful job like helping people move that pays rather well and blow it all on something frivolous. I dunno. I suffer from depression myself but haven't been suicidal in a long time. The thing is that it's a disease, and treating your mood is treating the symptom. You probably need medication and counseling to treat the disease. But for me, a major turning point was regarding the negative thoughts as something adversarial, a manifestation of the disease, rather than just "truth." Another thing that helped me was that I had the faith that if I did kill myself, I would be depriving someone of their soulmate. Corny. But it's the truth, it helped me a lot. And now I know I was right to have faith in that. I don't know. This probably isn't constructive. Try lots of things and talk to lots of people about it. Don't give up. Oh, and get some sunlight (or vitamin D). And avoid street drugs. Ecstasy in particular can cause this. |