I knew a bright young boy who could have done a lot of good things for this country. Yet, the young man he has become frightens me. His dream to be an influential chemist wilted, replaced by a sad lamentation of his wretched existence. What’s left of him is an aimless being, its youthful ambition gnawed by an enemy invisible to most. What’s left of him is a dependent young man, attached to his bedroom in an inexplicable ennui.
I knew a bright young girl who could have been a famous fashion designer. Yet, the young woman she has become scared me. She lost her enthusiasm, witty jokes and cheerful personality, replaced by philosophical pessimisms as her consolation. What’s left of her is a sad young woman, attached to her perscription drugs that require her to spend a lot of money, which would have been well spent if allocated to her study in university.
These drastic changes, which could have happened to anyone we know, from our family to our closest friends, is caused by one culprit. It is one culprit that could deprive us from our happiness, our motivation, our sleep, our appetite, or even our intelligence. Hell, it even saps away all our ability to enjoy simple things. At worst, it lead us to delusions, hallucinations and in some cases, causes stroke or cardiovascular damage.
Questions might arise. If there is something harmful that could potentially be catastrophe to our country’s young talents, why do we rarely hear about that in the media? Why no one talks about it? Why do our government never do anything about that whike spending all those money for pointless projects?
It is probably because the culprit of these changes is something that is considered a trivial matter to most people. It is affliction that our people see as a sign of weakness. It is an illness that would conjure up prejudice and stigma. People use its name easily to describe something really incomparable to. Sometimes, people use its name to mock others. Its name is depression. More than all pointed above, it is something most people ignorant about.
Depression is a silent killer, its arrival is unheralded. Depression cuts the sufferer into ribbons without being detected. Depression debilitate its sufferer coldheartedly, while leaving almost no trace of its existence. Most of the times, it is there although the sufferer didn’t realize it. In short, depression is the kind of enemy most people ignored.
Some people even confuse it with sadness, which is totally different thing. Simply put, sadness is a condition where you feel sad because everything goes bad, while depression is a condition where you feel sad in every possible situations, both in calamity and beauty.
What is the point of battling an enemy everyone is ignorant about? This is the reason why mental illness can never take the headline of a newspaper. This is why no one talks about mental illness despite its pervasive occurence. This is why the sufferers endure the prejudice they do not deserve. This is why, although can prove to be fatal and destroy dreams, mental illness can never take public attention as much as Ebola and Zika virus do.
This is what our countrymen do. Most of the times, we devote ourselves into following cause celebre that will not affect us in any way. We are intrigued by the endless kangaroo court drama of a corruption or murder story that bears almost no implication toward us or foreign presidential debate that has nothing to do with most of our lives. Mainstream media manipulated us to enjoy what we don’t actually need to read or talk about.
So, what’s actually the fuzz? Why do we need to learn and talk about depression? Ideally, awareness of depression would lead to these things mentioned below.
As Sun Tzu said, knowing your enemy is the first step to win a fight. This maxim reverberates to both people who suffer depression and those around the afflicteds. By knowing whathappens to them, people who suffer depression can take brisk and right decision to treat themselves. For those around the sufferers, they can take the right course of action such as bringing them to the psychiatrist or talk them out of self-harm instead of patronizing, judging, ridiculing them.
