​A healthy person’s response to conflict or pain isn’t usually “I want to die.” It’s “I want this to stop. I want to feel better.”

But for those of us who already struggle with the undertone of depression all day every day, stopping seems like an impossibility. Sometimes we just want our constant feeling of sadness to end. And with the idea of getting “better” being an impossibility of chronic illness, well... we jump to mental conclusions.

​​​I know, I know. What a depressing train of thought! But that’s why it’s called depression.

​It’s scary when a loved one, especially a loved one with a history of depression or suicidal tendencies, comes to you with this idea. There’s a whole host of things flying through your own brain in response.

“Of course you matter! Aren’t I doing enough to show that at least I care about you?” And of course, “Dying won’t solve anything! Please don’t kill yourself!” It’s tempting to voice all of those thoughts.

​Sitting quietly on things like catastrophizing internal dialogues, depression spirals, irrational fears, and suicidal thoughts can help cement them in place and give them more power than they should rightfully have.

​Imagine if every time you tried to express you were feeling bleak everyone around you started crying, shouting, telling you not to die, and trying to take you to hospitals. You’d never want to share again, much less when it was really serious!

​​Read between the lines. “I’ve been feeling like walking into a road all week” means “This week has been really hard for me.”

​Listen to and care about that struggle. If you get the opportunity, the best thing I know how to do for my friends is remind them of a simple fact: We don’t actually want to die. Ideation is not intent. Ideation is the formation of an idea and the process of putting it on a pedestal. 

Giving us an alternate perspective is incredibly useful in those times when we’re trapped in a mental circle.

​You are the one outside that speeding train of thought, outside the locked track, and outside the rut we’ve wound up in. You are the one with either the power to isolate, or the power to redirect that track and put us back on the path we were looking for.

No matter how much you have observed, you can not diagnose another. 

But you certainly can spot symptoms from a mile away once sensitized through exposure to those close to you with similar maladies. In the beginning, I couldn’t see my own child’s tics. Now I spot anyone’s tics from a mile away. Autistic idiosyncrasies are not always apparent to the untrained eye. Yet those who recognize the patterns suspect almost immediately. Manic symptoms follow a predictable trajectory, as do many mental health clues.  

Recently I counseled with a friend about bipolar symptoms, and what to do as an observer of another family’s challenges. As a woman my own age with various life experiences, she gets it. Here’s the risk you, my friend, or I face. We might offend someone if we indicate to them there may be a mental health issue and not just behavioral oddities. But here is the greater risk. Most people have no clue about mental health issues.  With no clue, there is no seeking of treatment. When one of mine was still little, there were classic symptoms that should have YELLED obsessive compulsive disorder to me, to teachers, and to health professionals. Collective ignorance created a gap of three years before diagnosis and intervention. 

Speak out what you see, sensitively and non judgmentally. If you have already made relational deposits in the bank of another, your instincts should be trusted. The counsel should never include a diagnosis, even if that diagnosis is obvious to you. Unless you are a licensed psychiatrist reading this blog, you can not, may not and should not diagnose another person with a mental illness. But tipping them off to get evaluated by a mental health professional just may save a life. 

The church has bought into a lie. It’s a distinctly Western lie, one that’s intricately intwined into our benefits based Christian faith. We protest loudly when we suffer the harsh realities of life, realities like our own mortality, or the mortality of those we love, or flesh based laws of inheritance, or we become victims of an unjust and corrupt system. Our pleas before our living God can become like fetishes we rub for favor, with no real submission to the God we claim to serve.

What is our response when our child is born with differences that reflect poorly on us, our genetics, or our parenting? It’s one thing to adopt a child with brain chemistry or developmental problems, but it is quite another to physically birth one, or even several. What is our response beyond the horrific dark abyss of grief when we lose a child? What did we actually mean when we surrendered our child to God in the first place? What we meant was never surrender, but actually protection unto perfection. Anything less is perceived as a breach of promise, and a crisis of faith ensues.  

On a flight this week, I sat next to a Chinese college student with Christian heritage. She marveled that her grandfather was a believer throughout the Revolution, wondering why he did not lose his faith. I suspect that during that season was when a truer faith was born, a mature faith with abandoned need to control, a faith that lacked the demand for an explanation. The result of fire in our lives is solely dependent upon our own constitution, not the source of that fire as being from heaven or hell.  The same fire that consumes stubble, purifies gold. 

My alarm this morning was a phone call from a suicidal boy our son's age. 

He and his mother were trying to decide if he should be admitted to our local psychiatric hospital. There are two reasons for admittance. 1) You are a risk to others. You might actually hurt someone. 2) You are a risk to yourself. You might actually hurt yourself. That's it. Anything else and the ER will send you right back home. Those are the magic words that = admittance. Bear in mind, however, that there is a difference  between wanting to die and making plans having obtained what one needs to implement that plan. 

What will they do for you there? That depends somewhat on the quality of the institution. First of all, they will remove all strings and sharp objects from your possession. Then they will keep you under constant surveillance until no longer deemed a risk which typically happens through stabilization resultant from med changes. Lastly, hopefully, they may have counselors there to help you deal. 

So what's the down side? Those hospitalized with you may have come from families very different than yours, scary different. Mom and Dad can only come during visitation hours, very dissimilar from when you had tonsils or an appendix out. You can't leave until the doctor says so, days to weeks from now even if you change your mind. 

Even so, you'll live to tell about it.