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Comment by kevinalexbrown | Hacker News Reader

If At 16 I found myself thinking seriously about killing myself. I spent more than one night at my sink with a kitchen knife at my wrist wondering if I should go ahead and make the cut or not. applies to you, you need to tell someone, if you haven't already.

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Absolutely. No matter how bad it seems right now. It gets better. Don't ever give up, no matter how trapped you feel.

Feel like the entire Ocean is over your head and drowning? Just wait a bit. Even the tides fall to the moon.

Talk to someone. But just as important, don't give up. There's very few things you can get yourself into that you can't work your way out of.

I'm thinking of particularly recent cases like poor Ilya Zhitomirskiy.

Don't give up, don't give in, you are stronger and bigger than the emptiness you feel inside of your heart right now.

But what I do rather than giving up is just sink into my own world, and if that's not destructive, I don't know what is. I just feel depressed, and then end up feeling that I should be stronger and I'm weak because I'm depressed, which just makes me even more miserable.

Meta-emotion will destroy you. I deal with it occasionally and it is absolutely vicious. I'm considering trying cognitive behavioral therapy to get away from it.

It can. What helped me was learning that depression is a physical phenomenon resulting from trained signaling pathways in one's brain that can be observed and retrained. That's what CBT attempts to do, but learning some of the science behind it allowed me to really figure out what I needed to do to help myself.

These are the two books that helped the most:

"The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060988479/ref=oh_o05_s00_i...

and

"Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345479890/ref=oh_o03_s00_i...

Right. Try and avoid abstract meta thinking about your state of affairs. Try and think in terms of concrete, short term plans. Things you can do today, this week, this month. Do them. Do them with purpose. Don't just exist and observe.

That's common: http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-...

Maybe give this game a shot, that a game designer created after herself having suicidal thoughts – it's a playful way to get you to do things that help when you're depressed (talking to people, focusing on short term plans, finding things that make you happy, etc): https://www.superbetter.com

I'm similar too, except that my father drilled a work ethic in me. I also grew up in a very rural area. So, my father would give me projects that HAD to get done. Some examples: "If you don't split this firewood, we won't be able to heat the house in the Wintertime." "If you don't clean these ditches, now in the Fall, then the Spring snowmelt will wash-out our driveway." "If you don't carry buckets of water to the house this morning, we won't have any to use the rest of the day."

Because of these tasks, I developed a "can-do" attitude. I learnt that if I can figure out how the most efficient way to split firewood, than I can also discover the most efficient way to be fit / be attractive / get high-paying jobs / etc. It just takes cleverness and determination to get out of a bad situation.

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