Depression Too Is A Type Of Fire by TAYLOR MALI

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[ryckbarn]

Thank you for this beautiful poem. I've been diagnosed with clinical depression and the last couple of weeks I have felt going deeper and deeper down. I never believed I was able to hurt myself until it actually happened. It truly describes that, depression is a fire indeed. I wish more people could acknowledge it.

[Beth Hollingshead]

I think it's interesting what he says about depression being a kind of fire, because David Foster Wallace, in his novel Infinite Jest, said something very similar. He was actually talking about suicide and how it can be very much like being stuck in a burning building and deciding to jump, knowing that you're going to die anyway. It isn't that you want to die, but that you're absolutely terrified about what's going to happen if you stay in that burning building. Depression is very similar.

[Ivory Atrament]

Are you calling electro-convulsive therapy brain washing? I'm not trying to be accusatory or anything, really asking because I couldn't tell. (Its just that my ECT experience has been positive so far, but its not over)

[Jshect]

Finally, a normal guy spilling his guts through poetry. I searched for a while and all I could find was this PC and feminism poetry. There's nothing wrong with PC poetry, but just like the PC crowd is always talking about diversity, I want to hear poetry from diverse people. Not just people with a PC liberal agenda (& I'm bisexual by the way, I'm not some homophobic republican). if anyone can recommend other poets like Taylor Mali let me know.

[Rupus88]

In both cases, it's often not that you want to die...it's just that you don't want to feel the torture of being slowly burned to death.

[happyanne515]

This is so brilliant and powerful and sad and true and beautiful.

[al7orriaa]

woooow brilliant

[Mistreena]

Depression too is a kind of fire, but as hot as those flames are, as suffocating as the smoke is, I'll keep trying to battle that fire rather than jump out the window, because I know there are others battling that fire right beside me.

Thank you for another beautiful poem.

[basiacheng1]

I ran out of words in the last post. What I really wanted to say that depressed people do not need to be told what is 'possible' in their condition, that they should be OK without meds. This approach , that depressed people should somehow treat their illness as something that they simply 'talked themselves into', that is absurd. Sadness after losing a pet, or even a time of mourning after a loved one died, that is sadness. Clinical depression is an illness and needs treatment. Cheers.

[basiacheng1]

People who write here what is 'impossible' or 'possible' can not possibly have gone through a single suicidal depressive episode. If they had, they would not have written that. I fell ill with major depression in 1986 and am still ill. Having gone through meds, therapies, consultations, more meds, self-help books, various 'mind-over-body' systems like meditation, hypnosis etc. etc. The carousel of treatments eventually slowed down to a manageable level after electro-shocks. Yes, brain washing.

[LrdAsmodeous]

Yes. His first wife did.

[laurarox80]

GONIX, your ignorance is showing. I have suffered atypical and major depression, major depression right now in fact, all my life. I am not sad. I have no use for emotions and they are hard to get at. That's what depression is, apathy, emptiness, really a chemical imbalance. Cognitively, I am healthy, I try to think positively or neutrally, but my body still has the symptoms of major depression. My body knows it is sad.