Life at the Bottom:

I know what it's like to want to die

My close girlfriends—who also endure depression and anxiety—and I have often joked that we ought to create a blog, a movement, pictures, a hashtag that is called “Life at the Bottom.”

The idea is to showcase what it is like to be down in the dumps—be that due to depression, no money, dysfunctional family, etc. Really any type of shitshow in life.

But not to glamorize it. To show the real, the raw, a genuine portrayal of what that looks like.

(Example: Ever see the tv commercials when they are trying to visually represent someone with depression? And they look clean, dressed, with their hair and make up done, just looking a little sad in the face? Ugh.

Life at the bottom, real depression, would show someone who looked exhausted, not sleeping at all, or well enough, or over sleeping. They wouldn’t have bathed for days or brushed their teeth. Their hair would be mussed up and you could practically smell their bad breath and body odor from looking at them. They would be wearing mismatched sweats or pajamas, whatever old things were most comfortable.

They may have old plates with food scraps (possibly crusted on, maybe even moldy and fuzzy) and wrappers and dirty classes around their bedside. Maybe alcohol bottles. Perhaps soda cans in excess.

And more than looking a little blue, they would look vacant, hollow, empty, miserable, tortured, in hell.

I’m not sure how exactly you capture that look on camera, with an actor, especially if they have never experienced that. But maybe getting someone who has been there, or is there, is key.

Either way, THAT is a portrayal of real depression. That is life at the bottom.)

Wouldn’t that be more helpful to those who need that support? For them to know they’re not alone, if they’re there, in that pit and experiencing that?

If I didn’t know depression, and own my own, aware and confident that it can and does look not appear the same for all people (and certainly unlike what those commercials show), I may not think that I have depression.

I may think that what I have is something worse, something different, that I am much more mentally ill. That I’m broken, maybe even beyond hope.

And the point of those ads shouldn’t be to sell medicine, but to offer support and resources to those in pain, in major depressive episodes and with mental illnesses. To offer hope.

You want to provide real hope? Show more accurate visuals, descriptions, portrayals of depression and what it looks like. Show variety.

Show complete and total social isolation. Show an inability to stop crying. Irrational and volatile anger. Show complete blankness, eyes and faces and bodies that appear devoid of any energy of life.

Show the internal monologue, the inner dialogue of someone who wants the pain to stop, who cannot stop the suicide ideation, who feels completely and utterly hopeless. Someone whose minds spins in circles, in endless worry and obsessive compulsive thoughts and anxiety. When they can’t sleep because they can’t shut their mind off. Show someone who sleeps 14-18 hours a day, so exhausted and fatigued in mind and body that they can’t get out of bed.

Then show someone the ever-so-painfully slow progression of it getting better, with long paths detailing work of therapy and how long anti-depressants take to work and the crappy side effects that they come with.

Show depression as a journey that requires endurance and support and time.

Show realistic experiences of and treatments of depression.

That is what will offer people solidarity and hope.

That will help those who of us, when we’re in that place, living at life at the bottom.