In a world smitten by the wonders of social media and the other marvels of technology, we are rapidly turning blind to the ill effects of too much of it all. Didn’t our ancestors warn us against a surfeit of things though?

With a change in the pattern of how the things are conducted around the world and increased connectivity, all thanks to the internet, while a fake sense of reassurance prevails, the ground reality remains entirely different. In the world of social media, while there are so many to watch you, there is hardly anyone to listen. But it is only one of the problems.

A sense of loneliness gets mixed with an anxiety that crops up from an anguished chase of dreams and things that an advertisement-driven world has filled our heads with. It keeps getting grimmer inside the heads but we keep putting up a show on social media. People are almost living two lives, one of them represented by touched up ecstatically happy pictures that we post and the other represented by the void that engulfs one with a feeling of aimlessness right after we are done posting one of those pictures.

The recent suicides of Anthony Bourdain and designer Kate Spade are a testimony of the same. The suicide of two people who appeared to have really successful, as well as illustrious lives, have actually unmasked a darkness that in a way haunts us all today.

Shaken with the two recent suicides, Shaheen Bhatt recently in a column for Vogue got candid about her lifelong struggle with depression and how cringing away from the topic is not a choice anymore.

Here are excerpts from the column that Shaheen wrote for Vogue:

“On a snoozy, muggy, pre-monsoon afternoon I woke from a peaceful mid-day slumber to find my phone flooded with social media notifications and messages. At first glance, I was sure I had misread the headline, so I instinctively pulled my phone up close to my face to reread it. “Celebrity Chef Anthony Bourdain, age 61, found dead in his France hotel room from an apparent suicide”, the headline read,” Shaheen writes.

She continues, “A few minutes later, I was heaving with sobs. I love Bourdain, I’ve been a fan of his ever since I read Kitchen Confidential and I closely followed his shows No Reservations and Parts Unknown.”

But Shaheen’s love for Bourdain isn’t the only reason behind her grief. Shaheen explains, “I was crying because every time I hear of someone who was unable to go on living with the darkness within them, I’m reminded of how that could have just as easily been me.”

She reiterates what she already opened up about a year ago, “I’ve lived with depression since I was 12 years old and since then I’ve been suicidal on more than one occasion. I’ve experienced the sheer terror of contemplating a life filled with unrelenting anguish, and I’ve been consumed by the terrifying thought of having but a single means of escape from a bleak, unbearable future.”

Shaheen then shares what she finds the most disturbing about the entire episode. She writes, “There is little worse than the knowledge that there have been countless others like Spade and Bourdain who have felt the same way and found the pain too unendurable to continue living. It is equally terrifying to know that this choice is not one they made in their 20s or 30s, but much later—a time by which one hopes to have found ways to douse the raging fires of depression.”

She recollects Bourdain’s words from 2016 when he had said, “A bad airport hamburger can send me into a spiral of depression that can last for days.” Shaheen thus adds building on the same thought, “That’s what depression is. Depression is a lousy hamburger that can instantly rob you of the will to live. It’s lying motionless in darkness for 48 hours, unkempt and unbathed. It’s shame. It’s isolation. And at its worst, depression leads to suicide.”

It is the lack of conversation around depression that scares Shaheen the most though. She writes, “Depression is everywhere, and still, it is nowhere. While there has been a definite upswing in conversation about depression and mental illness, it’s still such a taboo that we tend to talk about it in hushed tones and whispers.”

She adds, ” There is strange irony in the fact that we live in such hyper-connected times, but we use that connectedness to actually communicate less and less. We rarely know what is going on with people, even our friends, until they post about it on Facebook or Instagram and even then, it is often written off as a means of getting attention rather than a cry for help or attempt at transparency that it really is. It is no wonder then that most people living with depression and other mental illnesses are afraid to admit they’re suffering or seek help.”

She shares how after she started talking about the depression she could notice “a very real fatigue in the people” that she attempted to confide in. But Shaheen refused to give up the good fight and kept talking about it unabashedly.

She, however, seems to understand why people avoid the topic of depression altogether. She writes, “We don’t like to talk about depression because there is nothing romantic or glamorous about feeling like you’re losing your mind; no attractive selfies are waiting to be taken when you’re curled up crying on the floor, no witty one-liners are floating around your mind to tweet for likes.”

But she asserts that no matter how much we hate talking about depression, it, in fact, is a bitter pill that has to be swallowed. “We don’t like to talk about these things, but not talking about them is no longer an option,” writes Shaheen.

She also explains why as she writes, “Every day that we shy away from the subject, someone plunges further into their depressive hole, isolating themselves and believing they’re freaks. Every minute that we continue to stay silent we lose one more person to the horrors of depression and suicide. Every second that we choose comfort over reality we fail another Anthony and another Kate.”

“Talking about depression is no longer an option, it’s a matter of life and death,” she concludes.

H/T: Vogue