The Darkness Beckons

I guess I really ought to look up some statistics on Depression, the percentage of the population that suffer from it, the percentage of diagnosed cases that result in suicide, the percentages of suicides that were treated and untreated for it...but my depression leaves me too tired to even do that.
http://www.cdc.gov/ncipc/factsheets/suifacts.htm
http://www.allaboutdepression.com/gen_04.html
Isn’t Google a wonderful thing?
I took care of (as in “primary caregiver”) my great-aunt Clare for ten years. She was paranoid-schizophrenic to begin with and developed alzheimer’s on top of that. (I come from an incredibly polluted gene pool) One night, as I was holding her hand, waiting for her to fall asleep, she told me that she had realized her mind wasn’t working very well anymore and that she was sorry to me for what she was putting me through. I wept for hours later that night.
One of the scariest things about the darker moments of an episode of depression is that your mind begins to betray you. The inability to focus through the mental fog, the loss of memory of things you want-but not the things you need to forget and, mostly, the way incredibly inappropriate things pop out of your mouth that you didn’t even realize were in your mind. Looking in the mirror, tieing my tie to get ready for an audition , my gaze wanders up into my own eyes and “I want to die” comes out of my mouth seemingly of it’s own accord. (any wonder I didn’t get cast?) A friend telling me about a student of his who was hit by a bus and killed instantly and I say “lucky bastard” before even asking the kid’s name. The incredibly uncomfortable silences after these utterances aren’t much fun either. I mean, what’s to say?
When it gets really bad, it’s like being drunk-you have virtually no inhibitions. You feel that, not only do you have nothing, you actually are nothing, therefore, there’s nothing to lose.
Another consequence of the loss of mental focus is the loss of body awareness, a kind of drunken clumsiness. You forget how big or small you are and run into or miss things you’re reaching for. You feel the pressure, see the bruise or worse, the blood but, despite how badly everything else about your existence hurts-actually, physically hurts-you have no awareness of the damage you’ve just done to your body. Unfortunately, this doesn’t extend to body-consciousness. You laugh at the blood, you think “maybe some of the ugliness and pain will drain away.” But it never does. And, eventually, the episode fades and everything hurts that much worse-and leaves scars to boot.