Content warning: This piece explores issues around mental health, depression and suicide, which some readers might find upsetting.
Dear Dad,
The day you ended your life I remember you telling mom all you wanted was to get better. Years of therapy, rehab, increasing dosages of various medications, and you still felt like a lost cause, like there was absolutely no way you could ever get better for us. I remember overhearing this conversation on the phone, and, honestly, I wished you would get better too. I was tired of the fights, having to call the cops when you got too mad, wondering if I’d ever see you again when you stormed out of the house. But I think I was most tired of seeing how tired you were. I didn’t want you to feel hopeless anymore; I just wanted you to be normal.
Normal. What I used to intensely desire for you to be, now aggressively repulses me. I’ve learned to appreciate the parts of ourselves that deviate from normal. Normal is the enemy of happiness and the destroyer of contentment. To strive for normalcy is to strive for a subjective, arbitrary societal standard that is simply impossible to attain. However, I wished for you to obtain this, and for that I am sorry.
However, I am not sorry about wishing you got better– although I think my idea of what constitutes better is different now. I hate everyone that fed into the idea that your mental illnesses were burdensome, scary, and unmanageable. Sh*t, I hate myself for doing that. I think my old idea of “better” closely parallels society&#8217;s idea of perfection, this idea that we need to be motivated, accomplished and contagiously happy 99% of the time. But f*ck perfect. If I knew what I know now, I would tell you how beautifully imperfect you were. The most imperfect people do the most brilliant things, have the most unique perspectives, and undoubtedly are the strongest fighters. Striving for this unachievable perfection is what kills people. It killed you, and I hate that it took me 20 years and one disability course to figure that out.

Do you remember my obsession with shooting stars? You and mom told me you had wished upon a shooting star for a baby girl and then you had me. After that, I think I tricked myself into believing every plane flying through the night sky was one of these magical stars, because I so desperately wanted to make a wish. I remember carefully contemplating what I would wish for. It had to be something magnificent, because I only got one chance to wish for something that could completely alter my life. (So, of course, I wished to be best friends with Taylor Swift).
I see shooting stars less often now, possibly because I am now able to differentiate between a falling meteor and a flashing plane light. But when I do see them, I still wish. Except now, all I wish for is you: Not a “healthy” or “normal” you, just you and everything that made you, you. Because you were magnificent.
One of the things I know you did love about this world was learning- I assume that’s why you stayed in school for 12 years and became a doctor. And Dad, I’ve learned a hell of a lot. Specifically, I’ve learned a lot about disability injustice, and through this I think I’ve learned a lot more about you. No one ever told you that your illnesses were a piece of yourself meant to be appreciated. Yes, sometimes life can feel unmanageable because of your disabilities, but that doesn’t require you to remove yourself from the world, that requires the world to remove those things that are making life feel unmanageable.
I realise now, the world might be a relatively ok place for the few people it was created for: the nondisabled- the people that are physically and mentally capable of doing everything with ease and without any accommodations; as well as those whose identities escape bias and oppression. I don&#8217;t think anyone ever told you that these people are few and far between, but that society assumes they are everywhere.

In reality, so many more people deviate from this norm. Society has forced us to think we should hide the parts of ourselves that are messy, when the truth is, everybody and everything is messy. Author Kai Cheng Thom once wrote that, “beneath all health lies sickness”, and I think that’s beautiful. I think this truth is the foundation of our communities. Our differences, our battles, our messy deviations from “normalcy” are what make us the same.
Dad, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being angry at you for leaving me. I’m sorry for lying to my friends about how you passed. I’m sorry for not understanding. But mostly I’m sorry that you felt you had to be sorry for your disabilities. You so deeply wanted to prove that you were more than your bipolar disorder and depression, rather than being unapologetically yourself: A person disabled by society and all the challenges the world gave him.
The day you ended your life I remember you telling mom all you wanted was to get better. Dad, I wish I told you that you were already the best. You were my best everything- my best friend, best dance and singing partner, best fishing buddy, best supporter, and best dad.
You used to always call me your little angel, but now you’re my little angel. And I know you’ll be watching over me for the rest of my years on this earth. And throughout those years, I hope I can prove to you and the rest of the world that disabilities are not burdens, that “different” is not bad, and that life is worth living. I love you to the moon and back.
With love forever and always,
Kennedy
Afterword
When I remember my dad, I like to remember the good. I like to remember him taking me to get a milkshake when I experienced my first heartbreak. I like to remember belting out “I Knew You Were Trouble” by Taylor Swift outside our favourite restaurant. I like to remember every time he made heavy things feel a bit lighter by telling a remarkably cheesy joke.
It’s human nature to illuminate the good, the happy, the “normal” in our lives, but if this letter teaches you anything, I hope it teaches you that everything that doesn’t fit into those categories is equally as important. I hope it teaches you that you and everything about you is worth loving, worth caring for, worth living for.
For further readings on dismantling this idea of normal, as well as promoting disability justice in general, I recommend Mimi Khúc’s Open in Emergency, a compilation of relevant mental health pieces, as well as Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection.
Helplines
If you have been affected by any of the issues this letter touches on, you can call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (US) or the following UK-based organisations:
Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM): 0800 58 58 58
Samaritans: 116 123
Mind UK: 0300 123 3393
Photo Credit: Alex Ivashenko on Unsplash

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What your death taught me about disability, mental health and striving for perfection in an imperfect world.

A Letter to my Father

The Skeleton Twins navigates the issues of depression and mental illness with an accessible combination of humour and sincerity 
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After ten years apart, estranged twins Maggie (Kristin Wiig) and Milo (Bill Hader) find themselves brought together by an unlikely common goal: suicide. The film opens with Maggie on the brink of an overdose, interrupted by a call from Los Angeles telling her that Milo has attempted to slash his wrists. Hilarious, eh? Admittedly not. But Craig Johnson’s darkly comedic take on some pretty hefty subject matter proves a hit, opening up the world of depression and mental illness in a way that is immediately accessible. 
The events take place in the siblings’ hometown in New York state. Following his hospitalisation, Milo travels from L.A. to spend time recuperating with Maggie, only to find himself embroiled in the drama of her deeply unstable marriage. At the heart of it, both siblings are struggling with what Maggie describes as “feeling constantly disappointed with life”. Milo believes he “peaked in high school”, while Maggie finds herself stalling plans to start a family, turning instead to a string of affairs with French cooking connoisseurs and scuba-diving instructors. While her perpetually optimistic husband, Lance (Luke Wilson), remains completely oblivious to the plight of their marriage, Maggie finds solace in Milo and the two begin to regain the closeness of their childhood. Re-establishing a long lost sibling bond could have been a painfully formulaic watch, but the mutual understanding of each other’s flaws and instabilities provide the pair with a sincerity that transcends clichés. 
The real strength of this film lies in the casting. Wiig and Hader’s chemistry is undeniable, supplying their on&#8211;screen relationship with the kind of brother-sister inside humour that they have established over years of collaborative work. But there’s an edge to their characters’ closeness too, and however hard they try to help each other up, it’s ultimately their shared insecurities that bring them right back down. 
Luke Wilson’s portrayal of the endlessly good-natured Lance is also hard not to love. After all, who can resist a man who clears vast quantities of woodland with his bare hands and scales climbing walls in tight, functional trousers? But it’s his wholesome, big-hearted nature that makes him so wrong for Maggie, and this conflicting element runs quietly throughout. Even Billy (Boyd Hoybrook) is brilliantly cast as Maggie’s scuba instructor lover, excellently treading the line between the mysterious erotic stranger and a creepy outcast with the tendency to caress oxygen tubing. 
Taking a comedic approach to mental health issues could have been a disaster, but here, Johnson really makes it work. The laughably dysfunctional relationships between the key characters and their strained attempts to restore order are far from neatly packaged, but, rather, they are left exposed and unresolved. Far from trivialising the issues, the use of comic actors in the main roles resists sentimentalising their problems, instead providing us with an everyday picture of what living with depression can mean. Some days are funny, and some are brutally sad. The climax of this tension arguably comes in Hader and Wiig’s expertly choreographed lip-synch of Starship’s hit ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now’. Aside from the stark truth that this is one of the greatest power ballads ever written, this is also an undeniably uplifting scene: things have almost certainly hit rock bottom but there’s still laughs in there somewhere. 
Leaving the key questions unanswered is what gives The Skeleton Twins its edge. The concluding scenes are slightly disappointing and display a predictability that is absent from the rest of the film, yet the major dilemmas facing the characters are still left largely unresolved. The result is a story that asks questions without offering any real answers, that allows us an insight into depression without trivialising or reducing it. At the heart of it, this film is about life not going quite the way you expected; where it will go from here, that is for us to conclude.
<pre>Image from:http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2014/09/25/movie-review-the-skeleton-twins/</pre>

The Skeleton Twins: Laughing From Rock Bottom

The loss of Robin Williams has been a grim gain for depression as renewed interest ignites on the disease   
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We used to talk much about the &#8216;Big C&#8217;. Vast amounts of charitable action and billions of pounds and dollars have been thrown at the issue, and at research for treatment. On the other hand, the &#8216;Big D&#8217; – Depression – has remained a taboo topic in public debate and is the Cinderella of medical matters. It suffers from under-diagnosis, misdiagnosis, misunderstanding, confusion, shame and even contempt. It is usually accompanied by a shrug of annoyance and ’encouragement’ to ’pull yourself together,’ even though it is a disease. 
This Victorian approach to the problem only compounds the disastrous effects of depression on our society. The stereotypical depiction of someone with depression is of a listless mother (single for preference) with long, lank, lustreless hair; an expressionless face, dependent on a cocktail of “our” hard-earned, tax-paid-for drugs and welfare benefits. This is an egregious, unfair and shocking situation. I would suggest that it is up there with racism and bigotry, and therefore socially stigmatising. So it turns out our loss of Robin Williams is a grim gain for depression as the media turns its attention to the problem. 
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/aug/13/two-thirds-britons-not-treated-depression">The Guardian</a> ran a report on depression by their health editor, Sarah Bosely, in which she points out: ‘Less than a third of people with common mental health problems get any treatment at all &#8211; a situation the nation would not tolerate at all if they had cancer.’ She cites Simon Wessely, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, who remarks: ‘people are still routinely waiting for &#8211; well, we don&#8217;t really know, but certainly 18 weeks, possibly up to two years &#8211; for their treatment that is routine in some parts of the country.’ ‘Imagine,’ he told her, ‘the reaction if I gave a talk that began: &#8220;so, we have a problem in cancer service at the moment. Only 30% of people with cancer are getting any treatment, so 70% of them don&#8217;t get any treatment at all and it&#8217;s not even recognised.&#8221; You would be appalled and you would be screaming from the rooftops.&#8217;  Quite. 
While England&#8217;s NHS Chief Executive, Simon Stevens, sympathised with Wessley&#8217;s horror at these statistics, he informed him that the issue would involve a ‘much longer dialogue with the public.’ His comment scantly conceals the real problem: the government&#8217;s insistence on austerity as £12 billion additional cut-backs are due to come on stream. While the chancellor has no choice but to match pound-for-pound money raised in the voluntary sector for cancer because it is such an obvious, multiple cause of death, the government and, to a certain extent, society remain indifferent to or intolerant to the problem of depression. 
Depression, however, is largely a hidden condition with a less obvious connection to death. It is on a spectrum ranging from occasionally ’feeling blue’, recurring instances of what Churchill described as his ’Black Dog days’, up to a clinical condition needing life-long chemical solutions. In extreme cases, depression can lead to schizophrenia and, exceptionally, suicide. From symptoms occasioned by bullying through circumstantial set-backs, anxiety,  panic attacks and beyond, the causes are various and often multiple. 
Of those burdened with depression, 90% of sufferers remain untreated inside the NHS target of 18 weeks, while many remain undiagnosed or misdiagnosed as doctors are divided about depression and uncertain about the variety of symptoms presented, as well as the appropriate prognosis. Ms Bosely writes: ‘A larger proportion of people with psychosis, who have severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, are on treatment but even that figure is still only 65% according to Wessely, who added: &#8220;For most mental disorders it is still the exception not the rule to be recognised, detected and treated.&#8221;’ 
Wessley further argues that ‘the concern over pills for depression, anxiety and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) could be misplaced’. He suggests that much of the criticism assumes that GPs are putting more people on pills because of an absence of talking therapies. However, the number of therapists being trained to provide Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has substantially risen thanks to a government programme called Improving Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). ‘If you say they [pills] are more effective,’ he concludes, ‘I don&#8217;t really think that&#8217;s true. I think they are cheaper and easier. CBT is certainly more popular with some, but others don&#8217;t like it. The truth is most people don&#8217;t get either.’  My advice on CBT is this: don&#8217;t be  shy, polite or ashamed. As the old BT ad used to say: ‘It&#8217;s good to talk!’ 
Unfortunately, to governments, disease is unprofitable and has a negative effect on the bottom line. So we cannot expect any more help from the Austerity State. Disease exposes our frailty. It challenges our infallibility and expectations of immortality. The government can always find the cash to bankroll rebels in Syria or resistance in Iraq. It can finance arming the entire military industrial complex that is Israel and its brutal Israeli Defence Force (IDF). State-sponsored murder has always been a profitable business; medical care, however, is too costly and time-consuming. 
The Victorians abandoned sufferers of depression and dementia in asylums. It is high time we provided them with asylum – literally, &#8220;shelter&#8221; – and the care, comfort, humane medical or psychological assistance we can. Above all, it is our acceptance, understanding, love and compassion that are what we really have to offer &#8211; and offer it we must.
<pre>Image from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-rottenberg/seeing-depression-in-the-wrong-light_b_4945290.html</pre>

The Big D-Word

It&#8217;s time for an honest discussion about depression and suicide beyond media hype and cultural valourisation 
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In the summer of 2007, at the end of a long, rainy week incidentally filled with free cocaine, I made a serious attempt to take my own life. 
I am alive. In fact I live an incredibly happy life. But the memory of depression remains vivid, and my depression will return. On depression and suicide, I feel qualified to speak up. 
<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/robin-williams-dead-dies_n_5670050.html">Robin Williams, that wonderful man, completes suicide</a>, and suddenly everyone has an opinion. “Genie – you’re free”, some said. No, he isn’t. He’s dead. He is exactly the opposite of free. 
I’m a ditzy, garrulous English grad who likes cats and goes to lots of festivals. Relatively normal, you might say. Yet I was only 12 when I learnt to really hate myself. At 15 – when I was still getting gold stars at school for writing stories – I gave away my best CDs just before half term, planning to use the timeout of teachers’ and parents’ attention to get away with suicide. 
I finally did it aged almost 20, because an inviolable realisation came upon me that nothing would ever change. I would always be this person, and that meant I would always feel this way. The only sensible thing I could do was end my life. It certainly felt like a rational choice. I thought it would free me. At the time I was Christian, and I was pathetically eager to ‘go home’, to God, where I would be loved and there was no more pain. 
The problem with depression is that it robs you of perspective. It creeps up on you: you are gradually engulfed by a huge tarpaulin of self-disgust, and it all seems perfectly objective and normal. Nobody suddenly wakes up one day thinking of themselves in totally different terms, thinking that killing yourself might be a legitimate option, and often, eventually, the only option. 
But one day you do wake up and there it is, and the next day too, as far into the future as your myopic mind’s eye can see. Usually, at some point, most likely with treatment, it then lifts just as gradually as it came. 
“Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?” 
Albert Camus’ famous question, “should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”, will be familiar to anyone with severe depression. I am certain this question would have been familiar to Robin Williams. Is this really a choice?! Only someone with a seriously skewed perspective, in which literal life-and-death decisions and inconsequential options assume equal significance, could even entertain such a question. 
But ‘suicide is a choice’ is a myth which refuses to go away. It continues to be discussed as if the options – coffee or death? – were in any way equal, or the question legitimate. 
I lost two of my friends to suicide last year and I do not believe, as a third (also suicidally depressed) friend said, that it was “a choice they’ll never have to live to regret”. Only the myth of an “<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/126/40.html">easeful death</a>”, and a culture which cannot cope with conceptualising the loss of personal agency – of actual choice – could create a space where this logic survives and flourishes. My friends did not choose; they died from treatable illnesses, because their illness had temporarily removed their capacity to sense the worth in living. And part of our response as a culture is to discuss the ‘choice’ they made? Well-intentioned as it may be, I find it obscene. 
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s gorgeous line “<a href="http://www.bartleby.com/126/40.html">I have been half in love with easeful death</a>” tells you everything you need to know about the seductiveness of suicidal ideation. This romanticisation of suicide as the ‘other option’, the alternative to the ignobility of human suffering, is preserved in the literature, art and myths of every people throughout history. 
The fact that depressed people, searching for an alternative to their present suffering, find themselves thinking more easily of death than of change, is at least partly a result of our cultural attitudes to suicide, which we invoke and perpetuate every time we murmur ‘they’re in a better place now’. 
Suicide is not a way out, but the opposite 
In truth, if your interior life feels like total irreconcilable shit, or even just grey, pointless awfulness, death still offers no real alternative. You need to look for a balance of treatments or strategies which can assuage or cure those feelings, or you need to hold on, until it passes. Those are your alternatives. Suicide is not a way out of mental illness, but the opposite: it cuts off any route to recovery. 
We’ve got to start facing the horror of death. It is usually horrible and is almost certainly final. And if we found unnatural death as abhorrent as we ought to, we all might work a damn sight harder to stop killing each other. 
If we did – if the government and the press did – what then? My friends, who deserve to keep and enjoy their lives, would not be dying because there are ‘no beds’ in psychiatric hospitals; keeping people alive would be valued above not annoying millionaires with extra taxes; we would not act like confused vultures picking through an emotional carcass every time we lose someone; and perhaps ISIS or the occupation of Palestine would never have come into being. 
Robin Williams’ life should have been his own. Depression ensured it was not, not fully. Voyeuristic empathising and speculation in the press and elsewhere only serve to rob him once more of full ownership of his life. Let him keep the darkest feelings of his own mind; they died with him. He is dead. He was a wonderful man.
Depression is a treatable illness
But we who are left, how do we survive? Thanks to campaigning in recent years, we have a new understanding of mental illness; we are more aware that it can happen to anyone. 
Consequently it becomes even scarier: when it was something that happened only to freaks, victims, or ‘the weak’, you (not me, I’ve been there and got the T-shirt) could still imagine you were safe. 
Well, has my experience ‘made me stronger’, at least? Was there a silver lining to my suicide attempt? Was it at least, as the Independent suggests, a cry for help which DID come in time? 
For a long time, no. Nothing was gained, only lost: time, a boyfriend. A perfectly good tent. 
Trying to kill myself did lead me to a kind of freedom, but not freedom from life, or suffering: those notions are not real. 
My freedom was the realisation that, if I have decided to die, if I have even semi-seriously considered killing myself, then from that point on my life is my own. 
&#8220;Why shouldn’t I go through another day?&#8221; 
I can unhook myself from the societal sausage machine and pursue health, wealth and happiness on my own terms, because what’s the worst that can happen? It can’t be worse than death. Suddenly no shame, no stigma, no pressure, no comparison with others, no humiliation, no failure, exists. Why shouldn’t I take antidepressants? Why shouldn’t I go through another day? 
The problem is that this freedom is only accessible if you corporeally survive. 
So, don’t kill yourself! Things may be shit, and you will definitely think you’re being totally objective about it, but you aren’t, trust me. And whatever our mythology has led you to believe, you’ve got nothing to gain by ending it now. Do something else instead. If you don’t like coffee, have tea. Hey look, it’s not even you asking that question – coffee or death? – it’s depression. And when’s he ever made you happy? 
Different things help different people. These are the things that helped me: mirtazapine, cycling, lovers, pets, a great GP and a great CPN (community psychiatric nurse). A quiet home but a good party now and then. Forgiving myself. Allowing bad, better, and okay days, without panic about their implications. (Though to be honest, it was mostly the mirtazapine for me – that’s right, Daily Mail, I’m ‘hooked on antidepressants’ and you’ll never get them off me!) 
My depression is going to come back; it’s the nature of my brain. And when it does I may not see the upside for quite a while – that’s the nature of depression. But don’t believe the hype. In my experience, life with a mental illness gets better, not worse, as you get older. Life gets better. 
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<pre>Image from: http://www.listal.com/viewimage6087027</pre>