YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

I don't feel like getting into my whole backstory, but I've been suffering depression since I was about 8 years old, or for about 26 years now. I recently started listening to this podcast (after filling out some surveys while itunes was downloading the entire backlog). I felt very warm at hearing one of my survey responses mentioned so quickly, I'm not accustomed to getting recognition. One thing I was wondering, I've heard a couple of times a scale of depression mentioned on the podcast, 1-10, where 1 is completely suicidal, and 10 is perfectly content. Anyway, what I was wondering is: where on that scale would you fall if you were so depressed that you gave up on suicide, because attempting to kill yourself would only cause damage that you would then have to continue to live with and you don't have the energy to make the attempt anyway?

My best answer to your question is the square root of -1. I don't claim to know how imaginary numbers work but they seem appropriate for a question on a more meta-scale like yours. I know that feeling, I think. I call it "cold suicidal" because the thought and desire are there but the energy is reversed. When I am in that state I want to stop thinking about how pained things feel for me and move. Of course, the mind is racing while the body feels frozen in place. In those moments I would be upset because I couldn't cool my mind and warm my limbs such that I could actually get to doing the job. The answer to suicidal depression is apparently to escalate things by trying to work the brain to death while the body lay in place. Mental suicide is a contradiction in terms, at least. The mind can try it but it won't work.

Truthfully though, that mechanic stopped many an attempt. Maybe it was a sort of defense I built up and not a means to the end? At any rate, welcome aboard!

Thank you. Venting here seems to be helping me a bit. I still can't read most of the posts by other people, though, because they make me break down too easily.

I think the answer to my question is somewhere around -5, because it's a long, hard climb to the point where suicide is an actual risk again. i is an interesting answer, though, and I've spent a few hours thinking about what that would mean. It seems to have quite the mathematical and philosophical potential. Cold suicidal is also an interesting descriptor for it, I tend to think of it as 'too depressed to die'. When I do get that low, it seems that my willpower and stubbornness are simultaneously the only things keeping me alive and active, and also keeping me depressed at that level. It feels like you're operating on willpower alone to live day to day doing the least energy-intensive things possible, which for me these days is avoiding conflict at work and home by going to work and doing my job decently, if not particularly well, because it would take more energy and increase my frustration levels more to deal with my wife if I didn't go to work. Even if I tried to sleep through her harassing me about it. Basically, I go full zombie mode. It's kind of like having a car running on fumes and trying to coast it until you reach a gas station, which would be equivalent to a lifting of the depression. The fumes are my willpower, and it feels like if I run out of willpower, that's when I'll just try to sleep myself into a coma. Thankfully, I've only run out of willpower once, and spent 3 days in bed without eating, drinking, or getting out of bed longer than it takes to go pee. But at this point, if that happens, I'm pretty sure I would lose my family, not just my job, like I did that other time.

Hmm... that response turned into more of a rant than I had planned.