Search for keywords such as "I want to commit suicide", "what to do if I don't want to live", "how to commit suicide" and other keywords on major search engines, and the webpage will pop up the national 24-hour psychological assistance hotline at the top.
Every day, the staff behind this hotline receive countless requests for help. Helpers either have anxiety because of family, school, work, etc., or because of illness, money, feelings, etc., they have a common feature, that is, they have suffered different degrees of mental blows, and the only purpose of the hotline answerer is to "help them survive".
In recent years, mental illness has accounted for an increasing share of the global burden of disease, and on the annual World Mental Health Day, the topic of depression has always rushed to the hot search list of major social platforms.
While depressed patients are suffering, their families and friends are also suffering.
Invisible disease
Until her daughter went to see a psychologist, Yang Zhen couldn't understand how a child who did not lack food and clothing and had a happy family could suffer from depression overnight.
In 2019, Yang Zhen's daughter Chen Yingying returned to her hometown after resigning from Beijing and rented an empty room in an examination and research apartment near the university town to prepare for the World War II examination.
After Yang Zhen got the news, she did not say yes, nor did she say no, but just told her daughter that since she decided to do it, she would stick to it to the end - this was the only time in her impression that she expressed her opinion on her daughter's naked resignation.
The whole preparation process lasted for more than two hundred days, and at the beginning, Yang Zhen was afraid that her daughter would be under pressure, and sometimes she would make meals and send them to the examination apartment.
However, Chen Yingying felt that Yang Zhen's arrival had both delayed her studies and wasted her retirement time, and advised her to stay at home or find something to do.
Yang Zhen always wanted to help, so when Chen Yingying was away, she asked the landlord for the key and went to the apartment to clean for her daughter. After being discovered, the two had a big fight. After that, Yang Zhen rarely went to the examination and research apartment, and could only convey her concern through the form of a phone call.
This "online communication" strings together the entire preparation period. When her daughter finished her graduate school and finally went home, Yang Zhen happily made a table of dishes. However, during the meal, the daughter told Yang Zhen: "I have depression and will see a doctor tomorrow." ”
Yang Zhen did not believe that how could a person who had eaten and drunk suddenly suffer from depression? She felt that her daughter was just too tired to go to graduate school and needed to rest for a few days, but Chen Yingying insisted that her spirit was wrong.
Yang Zhen had no choice but to go to the hospital with her daughter for examination. In the diagnosis room, Yang Zhen listened to the doctor ask her daughter about her mental state for nearly three months, and only then did she know that her daughter had been suffering from insomnia for half a year, and sometimes there were self-harming behaviors, such as biting her own arm and cutting her wrist with a knife.
The test results came out, the daughter suffered from "moderate depression", and taking medicine for treatment has become an inevitable choice - this is the first time Yang Zhen has faced depression. Previously, she had always believed that as long as people did not suffer from physical pain such as colds and fevers, they were not sick.
This is also a misunderstanding faced by many depressed patients and their families. In the online communication community of depressed patients, a patient who has been ill for 10 years posted that he has not been taken seriously for 10 years, and many people around him just think that he is "mentally abnormal".
In the traditional Chinese concept, as long as there is no major problem in the body, any mental problem is somewhat paradoxical.
At the end of the diagnosis, the doctor instructed Yang Zhenduo to take her daughter out for a walk and guide her to move, rather than transmitting negative emotions to her all the time.
Yang Zhen was puzzled, and the doctor listed many specific examples in life: don't clean up the house for your daughter while complaining about her laziness; don't scold her because she got up late; don't throw your daughter emotions that you can't solve and can't digest; and so on.
Yang Zhen suddenly understood why her daughter was unwilling to let herself go to the examination apartment to find her, nor was she willing to answer her own phone.
Like the disease, the process of treatment is always silent, countless pills along the esophagus into the stomach, dissolved in the body, but people who take medicine and bystanders are difficult to perceive the effect, it is not like cold medicine, eat can not have fever.
Yang Zhen carefully carried out the doctor's instructions and took Chen Yingying to parks, amusement parks, shopping malls, scenic spots... Although her daughter is very obedient and lets her go wherever she goes, Yang Zhen still feels that her daughter has "not improved, there has been no change at all."
In the treatment of mental illnesses such as depression, confidence is the easiest thing to be consumed, which also means that once the companion gradually gets used to the daily life of the patient such as taking medicine, the energy spent on the patient will be less and less.
Standing in front of her daughter, Yang Zhen has never experienced such a complete sense of collapse, no matter what she does in the past few decades, she will almost get a response, but in the face of depression, her comfort and efforts seem to have become a bubble.
The invisible treatment made Yang Zhen uncomfortable, and the visible strange gaze also made her suffer a lot. Yang Zhen's home is in a very closed and backward village, and the east end of the village sneezes, and the west end of the village can hear it. After her daughter fell ill, Yang Zhen became reluctant to go to the crowd, because someone always asked her how her daughter came back, and how she didn't look as lively as before... She didn't want to listen to other people's opinions, and she didn't want Chen Yingying to be crowned "stupid at school" hat.
In late February 2020, just after the Spring Festival, the results of the examination and research were released on the list, and Chen Yingying's score was more than ten points different from the admission line of her favorite school, but after passing the examination and research line, you can take the adjustment. Considering her daughter's mental state, Yang Zhen took the initiative to ask her whether she should give up the transfer.
Chen Yingying decided to go back to work. Soon after, she took her suitcase and headed to Beijing again.
Grief that cannot be empathized with
For people with depression, doing nothing for a day can still feel tired, even if nothing happens or will be unhappy, and it is especially difficult to explain to others why they are sad, because most depressed people do not know why they feel numb and empty.
The popular science video "Why Are You Depressed" released by the non-profit "The School of Life" describes this unspeakable numbness: there must be some painful but unacceptable reasons for patients to be depressed, such as an unresolved marriage, an early parent-child relationship with love absence, and so on.
Patients deliberately ignore these factors because rather than bear the consequences, patients are more willing to exclude anger and sadness from consciousness as if nothing had happened, thus preventing themselves from hating those who are important. It is also this deliberate neglect that makes it more difficult for companions to understand patients.
After returning to Beijing, Chen Yingying was increasingly reluctant to answer Yang Zhen's phone call, because she was afraid that she would quarrel with her mother.
But in the case of sharing a room with friends, she is reluctant to show her unexplained vulnerability, because labeled words such as "sensitive" and "temperamental" are often imposed on patients with the confirmation of depression.
Therefore, even if a friend finds herself insomnia all night, Chen Yingying is not willing to reveal too many details of the disease.
"Without knowing it, few people can understand the vulnerability of people with depression."
Chen Yingying's friend said that before learning that Chen Yingying was ill, she had always felt that Chen Yingying's whole person had become extremely sensitive, and even a slight change in the weather would make her sullen all day, "If you know that she is sick, all this becomes understandable and acceptable." But it's just understanding and acceptance."
Xu Xiaoxue, a counselor at Wu Zhihong's Beijing Psychological Counseling Studio, describes this disconnected state of companionship between companions and patients as "sharing an endless white night" and believes that those who are trapped in depression are afraid of labeling with failure, not because they are not good enough and not good enough, but because they "feel" that they are not good enough and not good enough.
They fall into a vicious circle of self-denial, feeling that only by behaving better, more specially, or getting something that others don't have can they gain outside recognition, and this is the basis for patients to recognize themselves.
Judging one's own value through the value judgments of others is a typical depressive factor, because patients will change their behavior choices according to the judgment of the outside world. For example, an introvert will unconsciously choose occupations that require frequent interaction with others when he gets reverse descriptions such as "cheerful" and "bold", but the patient himself rarely thinks deeply about whether he is suitable for such a job, because once he tells others that he is not suitable, they will have a sense of guilt of "failing others".
On the other hand, traditional value judgments also make patients ashamed to open their mouths and speak out their emotions. What impressed Xu Xiaoxue was that during a visit, a mother activated the trauma she had been dormant for many years because she saw her child receive endless care from her grandmother and grandfather - after birth, she lived with her grandmother and did not return to her parents until she was 10 years old.
"Why should I be abandoned?" "If you mention the abandonment at this time, will you be considered extraordinarily pretentious?" At nearly forty years old, this mother suddenly couldn't figure out these questions. When she saw that her parents loved their children extraordinarily, she felt like a world away: what can I say to them, don't be pretentious, after so many years, they will not understand.
Judging one's own value through the value judgment of others is a typical depressive factor. (Photo/ Visual China)
People who open their mouths and laugh may also have depression
The theme of World Mental Health Day on 10 October this year is "The Mind of Youth, the Youth of Youth", and the focus is on the youth community.
Engaged in psychological counseling for 8 years, Xu Xiaoxue's intuitive feeling about the changes in the characteristics of the depression group is that the sick population is getting younger and younger, and the number of people with complete social functions is gradually increasing.
In the traditional view, the typical depression is sluggish, giving people an air of withdrawal from social life and alienation from numbness. But in the modern society where interpersonal contacts are very dense, teenagers like Chen Yingying who look at the sun and are actually depressed are gradually buried in various noises, they seem to have sound social functions, and even behave particularly pleasantly well-behaved, cheerful and optimistic.
Xu Xiaoxue believes that these sunshine-type depression patients are constantly releasing "I'm fine" to others, while also suggesting to themselves that "it's okay, I'm okay, everything is fine."
Deep down, they hold a diffuse, total desire to be liked and accepted. Once they feel that they are biased, they will wonder why they want to stand in the world.
A counselor who suffers from depression in a restructured family said: "In restructured families, this kind of depressed because of the desire to get the other party's approval is particularly common. Because the two parties are eager to prove that they live in a normal family by gaining mutual acceptance, but it is this deliberateness that makes people feel that the family is not normal. ”
During the consultation, the patient repeatedly said that depressed patients like themselves just want to be treated normally, even if diagnosed with depression, they are not glass dolls, and communication within the scope of normal emotional intelligence is acceptable.
Through communication with the parents of other types of adolescent patients with depression, we can more or less glimpse the reasons why parents and children in the patient's family are trying to show a normal state.
After their children are diagnosed with depression, the vast majority of parents will be extremely painful, reflective, self-blame, and their children's depression has become a punishment for their lives, allowing them to find themselves under-educated. They said: "I don't know how much it will affect the child at that time."
"I must have thought about it for the good of my children." "If I had known that, I wouldn't have done that."
When their children come to counseling alone, they are often numb to their parents' self-blame, thinking that this is just a kind of scene.
The psychology book Why Home Hurts points out the truth behind this regrettable fact: for a person, the most likely thing for a person to receive is full acceptance from his parents, but it is also his parents who first make him feel bad, which is a primitive loss and loss.
When parents continue to lower their standards and care about their children's personality and emotions, they often face a dilemma of: "I only ask him to be cheerful, am I not doing a good enough job?" And the child may think: "My parents have nothing to ask of me, why am I not satisfied, why am I not up to their expectations?" ”
This seemingly weak hedge fills the child's anxious chest with parental expectations.
Based on this, Xu Xiaoxue will also repeatedly mention in the guiding dialogue with the parents of depressed adolescents that parents should play the role of scaffolding in the process of assisting their children's growth, rather than the steering wheel. Parents should make it clear that their task is only to help their children face the cruelty of the world and reap the gifts of the world.
The fundamental motivation for a person to be able to endure all kinds of pain and go deep is that when he sees that others are good, he also feels good.
And the cultivation of this kind of mental intelligence requires parents to control anxiety in themselves, jump out of "good or bad", "success or failure", "right or wrong", see the child's true appearance, and trust "he is OK".
No matter what pain the child faces in the future, he can finally experience "I think I can".