Over at The New York Times, Dr. Jill Harper writes about the suicide of her husband.
It’s incredibly powerful, and there are a couple critical things worth remembering.
First, depression is usually chronic. It is rarely “cured,” definitively. You can think it’s gone, and then it ruthlessly comes back, worse than ever. That’s why Dr. Harper compares it to cancer. I often compare it to an autoimmune disease with their remissions and brutal flares.
Second, there’s a book called How I Stayed Alive When My Brain Was Trying to Kill Me. I’ve never read a truer description. In severe depression, your brain is trying to kill you. Sometimes it does.
Depressed people are more likely have heart attacks, strokes, develop early dementia etc., That is one way it can kill you. For others, it’s suicide:
Dr. Harper, writing in the NYT:
“When he died, my husband was still in treatment, as he had been for 20 years. After his first suicide attempt, he successfully went through intensive treatment of his disease — comparable to the radiation and chemotherapy phase of cancer treatment — and his disease went into remission. He did everything a cancer patient would have done to prevent a recurrence: He faithfully checked for the earliest signs of the disease returning, and minimized his risk factors. His psychiatrist adjusted his medications as needed and provided excellent medical care, support and counseling. But in the end, everything my husband was doing somehow couldn’t help anymore. He was still on the medication that had worked for so many years, but now it was failing.
Just as cancer may go into remission but still kill in the end, depression is a chronic disease that may ultimately prove fatal even with state-of-the-art care and resources. Not all cancers can be cured. Nor can all depressions. With the strong foundation of our love and his excellent care, my husband had almost 20 years of remission before succumbing to his disease.
I know that depression is not cancer, but both diseases can be insidious. With cancer we see uncontrolled cellular division and the spread of cancer cells throughout the body, and in depression we see the workings of neurotransmitters and how molecules affect mood. Researchers believe each is the result of genetic and environmental factors, and with my husband’s family background of mental illness and an abusive childhood, it’s not hard to see why he was sick.
Suicide is how my husband died, but depression was what killed him. His suicide was not a rational, intentional act, but a complication and fatal outcome of a very complex and difficult disease. Just as cancer invades the body, depression invades the psyche. And just as the surviving family members of patients with incurable cancers know that they were powerless to stop the progression of the disease, so are the survivors of a person with depression who dies by suicide.”
