Depression: Vitality's Cancer.

Vitality's Cancer.

Depression. The less attractive ‘D word’ on the lips of many a student, that most would also rather keep hidden from peers and parents alike. The numbers of those affected is unfathomable to say the least. With such an apparent problem, one would assume the task of tackling the totalitarian tumour of happiness would be a core ideology of the masse. Yet this is the perfect example of how the growth is granted such room to thrive, for how does one fight in a battle it does not understand?

Popular belief for many years, has been that the antithesis to depression is of course happiness. But this meek, simplistic view only inhibits the ability to construe a rough insight into the deepest of hellholes a depressive suffers and fights. (The synonymous cancer-depression overlaps are a fitting metaphor throughout). Depression is not the lack of happiness, but an overwhelming lack of vitality. To lose such bounce, buoyancy, or brio, leaves one at the peril of an omnipotent shadow, overarched into aspects of life often unknown, and thus taken for granted. A common outside view of someone battling depression is a glum, lacklustre person, struggling to smile in what seems a scene of satisfactory serotonin. But the problem delves deeper. As not only are the highest of emotions affected, but this beast overstretches into every crevice of life imaginable. Positivity is lost in a multidirectional manner, not just to the cathode of life.

A personal low of mine, came  upon the passing of my paternal Grandad: an easy occasion to find yourself lost in a state of heightened low-mood. However, a contrary feeling was ever-apparent in me. Or, perhaps not contrary, but precisely a lack there of at all. My own Father, stood at the grave of His; where three generations of manhood was reduced to two; little more than a small shrug of the shoulders was to be offered on my behalf. ‘Dad tears’ are world renowned to bring the most brutish of brutes to a state of emotional wreckage; yet I was fully comfortable in looking him in his tear-wrenched eyes, then glancing those eyes of mine to my sisters, with a whisper that ‘He might need a hug or something’- what a proclamation. My point here is that is it far too ignorant to only be able to see depression in times of joy, for vitality is needed in sorrow and sadness too. And it was in these very times where sadness should have been rife, I could barely offer sombre.

To combat such depression? To help those in similar positions? To finally attain a chemotherapy for depression? Much must be taken from the multifaceted march against cancer to begin with. The dreaded ‘C word’ is no longer a taboo as such. And the all-too-common ‘D word’ must follow suit, as the sufferers are doing so in silence. And it is only once an era of mental-health awareness and understanding is developed, will remissions from depression arise.