In light of all the recent discourse trivializing and dismissing Robby’s suicidal ideation and depth of crisis which reflects society’s general attitude towards depression and other mental health issues, I want to share this excerpt from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
Robby wasn’t and shouldn’t have been fixed by something akin to “you matter” or “don’t kill yourself”. He wasn’t thinking about killing himself because no one cares about him. He wanted to die because life had grown so painful for him—life in the ER was “leaching something from [his] soul” but he had no life outside the ER. So life as a whole was painful and he saw no way out.
There is no easy fix for this constant, incessant pain. But good news, you are not asked to fix him. His fictional nature aside, you are also not tasked with fixing up anyone in real life. But what you should do, is have compassion—to have some empathy for others who are going through such pain. And for gods sake, don’t trivialize it.
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