I've noticed a trend online where, when somebody talks about a loved one who's experiencing mental illness-- or when somebody makes a post that reflects symptoms of mental illness-- people will flippantly reply variations on, "Get help" or "They need therapy" or "Please take your meds" or even, "You need to cut this person off until they start taking care of their mental health."

Like, on one hand, I'm glad that the concept of mental health care is less stigmatized these days than it was several years ago, and on the surface, what they're saying is good. But there is an implication there that 'getting help' will mean a solution to the problem, that taking medication or seeing a therapist will mean no more troubling or annoying symptoms. It almost sounds like a way to... try to get people to shut up and stop talking about their feelings, or a way to make 'I don't want to see someone experiencing mental illness' sound progressive.

I don't want to get into how expensive and inaccessible mental health care can sometimes be-- that's a well-known fact-- but the truth is that someone who is receiving care for a mental illness... still has a mental illness. And they may still have bad days. 'Just get therapy' doesn't mean someone will no longer experience depression, anxiety, OCD, a personality disorder, Bipolar disorder, eating disorder, you name it. They may learn to understand themselves better, have an outlet for their feelings, and learn new coping mechanisms, but it can still be pretty darn hard for people to live with a mental illness. Medication doesn't always make someone with mental illness indistinguishable from someone without. It's not like an antibiotic where you take it for 10 days and you're back to 'normal.' It also comes with challenges and downsides of its own. And it can be difficult to take the initiative to begin treatment when you're feeling super depressed.

Someone whose behavior may seem unusual or upsetting... may already be in therapy. They may already be on medication. They may already be taking care of their mental health as best they can, but they may still need an extra listening ear or a little bit of patience and understanding. They may not react or respond to situations the same way that you do. The idea of 'get some help so you stop acting like that' can give off a whiff of the 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude toward mental health challenges, or push the 'you're not trying hard enough' myth, that all you need to beat mental illness is to try harder.

The reason I'm making this post is because someone in one of my meme groups was talking about how much he hates people whining about their depression and how they need 'professional help.' This is a really, really challenging time in the world, and some people are not doing their best even if they're trying their best. We could all do with a little compassion right now, because you never know what someone else is going through.

When reading the post, I thought about some of the sad stories we've seen in the news in the past few years about beloved celebrities who have died by suicide. These public figures could DEFINITELY afford treatment. They probably had received treatment. For example, Kate Spade's husband said that she had been actively seeking help, attending therapy and taking medication for 5 years before her death. Mental health diagnoses can often be a lifelong battle. And not everyone feels up to giving 110% every day.

Our current world still doesn't have advanced enough medical science to come up with foolproof treatments for all mental illness. It feels easy to recommend therapy and medication, and a lot of people could use more mental health help, but please try not to assume that someone isn't already doing that. Right now, even many people who had figured out a great system that works for them could use a little extra help from friends and family.

#mental health #mental illness #cw: suicide #cw: mental illness #suicide cw #mental illness cw

schmergo

cw for suicide ideation and stuff

I keep reading about how Millennials all want to kill themselves. Weird thing about my experience is, I consider myself an unusually happy person who hasn't had the same struggles with depression as many of my friends, but I have always had the thought in the back of my mind that I hope I die before my luck runs out-- in a very passive way, mind you. I never want to hurt myself, but I'm consistently surprised I lived this long given how accident prone I am and I find it hard/scary to imagine too far into the future. I've lived a happy life so far, but I'm afraid of the potential consequences of screwing up my future or living in an even more dystopian world, so I kind of hope I die soon so that I never have to be miserable and have nothing to look forward to. I think this might be kind of common, too, because we see so many articles and things with a really negative outlook about the future or Millennials’ opportunities in life-- saying Millennials will never be able to own a house, will earn less than their parents, won't be able to both work and pay for childcare, won't have health insurance coverage, we'll have student loans forever. They say that in ten years, global warming and pollution will reach an irreversible point and we'll be feeling the dangerous effects of climate change, etc... it seems like the odds are stacked against us and making one wrong decision can irreversibly send us into a future with no hope. Does that make sense? On the other hand, I'm afraid to die because there are so many small things that I look forward to, like wanting to see the sequel to a movie that I like or having tickets to a show in several months!

(And in case you’re worried, yes, I am absolutely okay. I’m not in harm’s way at all. Again, I’m a happy person who leads a full and rewarding life. I just... don’t want to NOT be.)

#cw: suicide ideation #cw: suicide #millennials

schmergo

breakdown-voltage asked:

Romeo and 19.

19. People they’ve hurt or indirectly killed, and how it affected them

Ooohhh, poor Romeo. Romeo never wanted to hurt or kill anyone, and I think that’s such a tragedy because he winds up killing more characters than anyone else in the play. From the very beginning of the play, Romeo resisted the idea that masculinity means violence. He never gets involved in his family’s feud or the fighting in the streets. He has a gentle nature and isn’t afraid to get emotional.

Mercutio dies because Romeo tried to get between him and Tybalt, blocking him with his arm and trying to keep him safe, but it’s Romeo’s very presence that causes Tybalt to stab him. We know how Romeo is affected by this, because he becomes so overwhelmed with emotion that he kills Tybalt– something that I always imagine being an absolute ‘crime of passion,’ an outburst of strength that Romeo didn’t even know he had.

I think it’s worth noting that he never wanted to hurt Tybalt or take his life. As he says when Tybalt approaches him for the fight:

“I do protest, I never injured thee,But love thee better than thou canst devise,Till thou shalt know the reason of my love:And so, good Capulet,–which name I tenderAs dearly as my own,–be satisfied. “

The fact that Tybalt responds with violence to the whole situation makes Romeo reciprocate the violence. And he feels incredibly guilty about having killed Juliet’s kinsman and hurt her in that way, weeping on the ground in a piteous heap. The Nurse and Friar constantly tell him to rein it in and be a man, but poor Romeo is clearly incredibly damaged by what he has done.

When he erroneously hears of Juliet’s death, though, we see Romeo’s emotional disarray lead to even more violence– violence that is shocking to think of. When Balthasar accompanies him to Juliet’s grave, the once-gentle boy snaps at Balthasar:

“But if thou, jealous, dost return to pryIn what I further shall intend to do,By heaven, I will tear thee joint by jointAnd strew this hungry churchyard with thy limbs:The time and my intents are savage-wild,More fierce and more inexorable farThan empty tigers or the roaring sea.“

YIKES. Clearly, he feels so broken by loss that he has lost any sense of anything beyond blind emotion– no sense of right or wrong or anything besides his obstacle. He already plans to die. And when he kills Paris, it’s really for not any reason other than that he’s in his way. Something that once would have destroyed him is now just something to get out of his way before he ends his own life.

After doing so, though, he becomes a little more reflective:

“ He told me Paris should have married Juliet:Said he not so? or did I dream it so?Or am I mad, hearing him talk of Juliet,To think it was so? O, give me thy hand,One writ with me in sour misfortune’s book!I’ll bury thee in a triumphant grave;A grave? O no! a lantern, slaughter’d youth,For here lies Juliet, and her beauty makesThis vault a feasting presence full of light.Death, lie thou there, by a dead man interr’d.“

He isn’t jealous of or angry at Paris– instead, he commiserates with him– but it’s also clear that he is not totally in his right mind after this excess of grief and guilt Romeo has been through.

So I would say that the deaths he causes throughout the play affect him so much that you wouldn’t have the play at all without them. Romeo, the sensitive character who wanted to make love, not war, fuels the entire plot through acts of violence. Now that’s a real tragedy for you.

#Romeo and juliet #shakespeare #romeo #cw: suicide #cw: violence

schmergo reblogged

schmergo

I think people often miss the real point of “To Be or Not to Be.”

I feel like people often misconstrue the famous “To be or not to be” speech in context of the bigger show. There’s more to it than the first few lines. I feel like I often see it interpreted as being this big moment where he contemplates suicide, but the thing is, this scene is in Act 3 of the play. He’s already been through a lot. This cannot be the first time Hamlet contemplates suicide, especially given the first soliloquy (”O that this too, too solid(sullied) flesh would melt/ Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!/ Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!”) From the very start of the play, before even witnessing the ghost, he’s been longing for the release of death.

What’s special about “To be or not to be” isn’t that he contemplates suicide, it’s that he contemplates the ramifications of suicide, the consequences beyond just the fact that it is forbidden. It’s someone who has longed for death wrangling with the idea that death might be even worse than life. “To be or not to be” is essentially, kind of the first time in this play he’s thought about wanting to NOT die. (Remember when he told Horatio, “I do not set my life in a pin’s fee” before seeing the ghost, or when he joked to Polonius about how willingly he would part with his life?)

Yeah, the first bit of the speech is him talking about death lovingly as a sleep, a rest, but then he realizes that if death is a sleep, he may still ‘dream’– experience an afterlife that is more like a nightmare than anything restful. The whole second half refers to the terror of ‘the undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.’

Hamlet has recently seen the ghost of his beloved father, who is sadly doomed to walk the earth because he was murdered before he got a chance to pray and have his sins forgiven, so he’s unable to go to heaven. He seems lonely and Hamlet expresses pity and concern for him (”Alas, poor ghost!”) and promises to remember him. How could he not remember his father’s miserable end now– and for someone who just wants to end it all, what could be more terrifying than being trapped to only half-exist forever? Hamlet already basically feels like a ghost of his former self; he doesn’t want that feeling to last forever.

Yet what if this wasn’t even his father’s ghost but a demon sent to trick him into committing murder or stealing his soul? How can he trust something so impossible, so beyond his philosophy, as a ghost? Now he’s stuck in this place of fear and uncertainty with a nearly-impossible task to do from an uncertain entity. He wants to die, but he’s afraid to die. He’s a big old mess.

It’s also worth noting that this speech is the next time we see Hamlet AFTER he makes the plan to trap Claudius with the players’ performance. He knows that’s risky behavior and could get him in hot water– that Claudius has already sneakily murdered once and could kill him next. Hamlet isn’t sure he can pull off the ghost’s task for him without getting killed, but he thinks this trick could be the perfect first step to make sure that that really was his father’s ghost. If the ghost was telling the truth, then Claudius does deserve to die. This cautious procrastination of his in arranging the scheme with the players directly ties into what he says in “to be or not to be” about how “ enterprises of great pith and moment/ With this regard their currents turn awry,/ And lose the name of action.” He’s talking of fear of death stopping people from accomplishing their goals in general in this moment, not just about whether or not to commit suicide, and about this risky thing he’s about to do.

Obviously, this speech is famous for a reason, and a lot hinges on it, but since it does come at this odd moment in the play, I think it can often stick out like a sore thumb. Just thought I would put my own two cents in.

schmergo

Now, this is just personal for me, but when I played Hamlet, I approached him as someone going from feeling trapped, hopeless, and craving death to someone who has to learn how to take control of his agency and learn what power he has, both to fix things and to destroy things.

I feel like when he comes back from his trip overseas, he is more confident and more direct than he has ever been before, more willing to take action, whether for better or for worse, because he has seen that he is capable of taking life and executing his own plans and finally feels ready to take on Claudius,. That's the arc that I used to approach his character, and my Hamlet actually did NOT want to die at the end of the play, but used his last moments to take control of the situation he was in with a clarity of purpose. So having "To Be" almost halfway through the show is perfect for me as the hinge to that arc-- the moment when he feels the most afraid to carry out this revenge, the most aware of the potential consequences, but right before he has taken his first step.

#cw: suicide #tw: suicide #cw: suicide ideation #tw: suicide ideation

schmergo

SO, because I'm appearing as Juliet in a staged reading of Romeo & Juliet this Saturday, this is my planned post about why I love Juliet and this play. I do think she is one of the more misunderstood literary characters, and R&J itself suffers from a lot of oversimplification nowadays.

(NOTE: This post deals fairly heavily with themes of suicide and other dark topics.)

I get why people are all like “Romeo & Juliet is a terrible relationship, all those people died” and “R&J is not a love story, it’s about kids making stupid decisions” and everything– but I feel uncomfortable with how those people are putting all the blame on the kids themselves.

I think the play makes it pretty clear that the kids were unable to overcome the violence and hatred rampant in their environment in which they grew up, and that the adults in their lives were not supportive or willing to listen or help them. The parents have no idea what their kids’ hopes, dreams, or interests are, and their kids don’t feel comfortable talking to them about their lives. Romeo & Juliet is a great tragedy because every tragic event within it was completely preventable. The lovers may have taken their own lives, but the ‘tragedy’ is that the other characters disregarded their feelings and their words, and ignored them because they’re just stupid teenagers… much like a lot of the more jaded readers of the play.

Yes, the over-romanticization of the play is a problem, but it also contains some of the most beautiful and vivid love poetry in the English language, and shouldn’t be dismissed as 'haha, stupid kids, Romeo can’t keep it in his pants.’ Romeo and Juliet themselves are no more 'stupid’ than Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes (Macbeth and Othello come swiftly to mind), and Juliet in particular is a very well-developed, intelligent, and interesting heroine, one of Shakespeare's most complex.

She is not quite fourteen years old and has had very little freedom in her life. (What were you like at age 'almost fourteen?' I was writing Voldemort's blog on MuggleNet and obsessing over Pirates of the Caribbean.) Up to this point in the play, she's only been seen by others as a daughter of the Capulet family, who talk about her as if she's not there and don't seem to know how to talk to her without the presence of her garrulous nurse. She barely speaks around her family and mostly just obediently listens as they make plans for her. Nobody has ever really questioned what Juliet wants.

This is why she and Romeo connect so quickly. It's not just a romance thing-- it's the first time they've ever met someone who sees them as themselves, not just an extension of their family, not with preconceived notions about who they are and what they want. (Romeo, I'd argue, has the opposite problem from Juliet-- too much freedom to do whatever he wants, and no direction in life. But neither he nor Juliet are taken seriously by the people around them.) She has no friends her own age, no freedom to leave her house. She is STARVED for human connections without even really realizing what is missing when she meets Romeo.

Juliet is the one who keeps questioning whether they should be more cautious. She is the one that tries to slow things down... but though she knows that's what she SHOULD want, that's not really what she wants, and when the time comes, she is the first one to bring up the topic of marriage. She is such an eager, earnest portrayal of young desire, without it being vilified.

For the first time, the future opens up for Juliet, and no wonder she is radiantly happy to rush into marriage with Romeo.

But for the entire second half of the play, Juliet experiences a narrowing of her future, from a broad horizon to a single point. When she thinks she and Romeo are finally bound together, she learns about his banishment-- the human equivalent of buying an ice cream cone and dropping it on the way to the car before you can enjoy it. Then she learns that her parents want to marry her off to Paris immediately. She had a glimpse of a future that she could control, and now it's being taken away. And it's not just that she doesn't love Paris-- it's that she's already legally married, and she fears she will be damned forever if she gets married a second time. She's from a very Catholic background. I can forgive her theatrics.

Her father doesn't just order her to marry Paris. He screams at her for a long, protracted, disturbing scene in which he says he wishes she was never born and that he doesn't care if she hangs, begs, starves, or dies in the street if she doesn't marry Paris. He threatens to physically harm her and the nurse for defending her. When she begs her mother not to make her marry Paris, her mother tells her "I have done with thee" and leaves her. Even the Nurse finally counsels her to listen to her father and marry Paris. Juliet is shattered, and she sees that her family doesn't REALLY care about her or what she wants-- they only see her as an extension of themselves, and all of the jolliness that Lord Capulet usually displays is conditional on how good she is at living up to his expectations, nothing else. She really believes nobody else in the world loves her except Romeo, that her life is not important to anyone else.

If Juliet's father hadn't been so terrifying, if Juliet's mother hadn't sided with him, if the Nurse hadn't resigned herself to capitulating to Lord Capulet's plan, none of this would have happened. If Juliet trusted Tybalt enough to tell him about her love for Romeo and if he cared about his cousin to support her choice, none of this would have happened.

Her future narrows again when she wakes up in the vault, Romeo dead beside her. The plan didn't work. Somehow, through confused messages, Romeo is dead BECAUSE of her. The Friar tells Juliet to leave in haste, that he'll conceal her in a nunnery. That is the LAST thing that she wants after being locked away and forced to be quiet and obedient her whole life-- not to mention never being allowed to love again. When she tells the Friar to leave without her, she hears the watch coming and panics again. If they catch her, it'll be worse than if the Friar takes her to the nunnery-- they'll take her home, and she's already seen her father at his worst. How can she bear to go home to him? Neither of the futures that present themselves give her enough room to move freely. The only way to fight against them is the worst thing that a person can do to herself. Suicide is NEVER pkay and is never the answer, but I think Juliet's is oversimplified into being 'over a guy.' It is a little more complicated than 'over a guy' to me.

This play is so special to me because it is one in which teenage lives, male AND female, are portrayed as valuable, and one in which the 'tragedy’ in question is the loss of ordinary young people, not a great kings or war heroes.

Juliet is witty, imaginative, innocent, sometimes a bit of a brat, hopeful, sensitive, and loyal. She is a dream of a character to get to play, even in a staged reading, and I think she deserves to be taken seriously. I only hope I can do her justice.

#romeo and juliet #shakespeare #r and j #juliet #cw: suicide #romeo + juliet #literature #theatre

schmergo

I use the word 'death' 75 times in my senior thesis, and the word 'suicide' 94 times. I use the word 'happy' twice. Sorry, Pharrell.

#cw: suicide #literature major #senior thesis #senioritis