As you probably know the writing of an essay is to gauge the writers creative ability and to assess the fluency of their mind and its properties to assimilate within actions and sounds their take and acknowledgement of the world around them. In such confines your wish to project the panoply of Depression is both brave and challenging. If one had a coin for every time you have heard the sufferer’ say that it is the inability of people without the illness to be able to understand its vagrancies or machinations then we the patient’s would be very rich indeed.
You have the opportunity of perhaps giving some insight into one of the most insidious of illnesses and I would encourage you to use such an occasion. You do not identify yourself as a mental health user but I think in some way you must be associate with the illness to consider such a subject. You ask for assistance in creating an opening for the subject heading ‘Terrifying things people do ever day’ With your approval I would offer the following: 1.
It without doubt borders on the ‘terrifying’ when as a severe depressive you awake each morning to sense if that feeling of loss and imprisonment is waiting for you to wake. By long experience you know that through a lifting of your eye-lids, if you will be caught for that full day in the snarling web of black depression. 2. You know then that the day ahead will be a struggle and a battle, competing with a condition that wants to ensure that you suffer ‘terrifying’ mental and physical pain. 3.
It is a terrifying experience to attempt to live through such a day without the proper function of the brain giving out proper signals to relay cognition, memory or the confidence to speak in public or to feel or act naturally. 4. You feel ‘terrified’ and afraid and because you are in such a low mood feelings of fear are multiplied until you reach a point of standstill. In many cases you become almost dumb unable to vocalise your symptoms or the anguish of the illness. 5. You are ‘haunted’ and terrified with a past but no future and cocooned in ‘hopelessness’.
Hopefulness has become an early victim to the illness. 6. As a form of retreat from the illness you seek out the safety of the duvet and sleep becomes a form of retreat but such safety turns to terror when you exaggerate in a day the wakening up experience. 7. You become reclusive which can be in itself terrifying, the world continues to spin, and the traffic flows and people like ants hurry and scurry about but you become ‘invisible’ which is frightening, you are alone desperate for companionship
but no one appears to notice you or to give you the time of day. 8. In the most acute stages, the mind wanders into that terrifying prospect of suicide and death becomes a welcomed conclusion to the pain and agony of a brain so badly affected with a chemical imbalance. It’s at such a junction that the terrifying prospect of death challenges your will to live and in the most perverse way a battle not of the mind but of the will and spirit rages on in a ‘terrifying’ contest. Normally this takes place against a backdrop of darkness.
The mind is lost in the dark but the soul must somehow find the light to survive. An episode of full-blown suicidal tendency is the most terrifying the non-soldier in life will ever experience. 9 The survivor from this mental holocaust will be now have reached the stages of therapy and medication and if properly diagnosed will have started a programme of lessening the effects of severe depression. It is still to be proved if Depression and Mental Illness in all its labels is curable. However the medication is probably for life.
Whilst you may reach a level of functioning, it’s ‘terrifying’ to be in such an abyss without the feeling or exact knowledge of expectant hope and true well-being. 10. The sufferer who has incurable Mental Illness will probably have lost a half to a third of their working life and to enter that vista of old age without savings or pension plans has that re-visit to ‘terror’. Life as it has been commercially re-designed is to get to that nirvana of retirement, financially protected and making for the golf course.
This is not the option of the long-term ill, their ‘terrifying’ journey into the final years have already been predetermined through sad event and circumstance. Terror is looking forward and seeing no hope; Terrifying is living that no hope. This is what millions of sufferer’s do every day. In a land that refuses to accept the depth of the illness. The caption for any documentary on mental illness today would need to encapsulate ‘The Walking Dead’ in our lifetime this is truly ‘Terrifying!