In Defense of Sadness

Today is December 15th, 2020. Halfway through the last month of a year that somehow simultaneously dragged on and flew by. I’m going to be honest and just say it — 2020 totally sucked. You probably know that, but let me just drive the point home. To date…

A Plea from a Survivor of Suicide Loss

March 27 started off as a perfect day. My whole family was together because of the lockdown. We stayed up late the night before playing cards and eating takeout and got to sleep in that morning. We had lunch together, eating leftovers and watching “How I Met Your Mother.” We went for a walk that afternoon, and talked about nothing and everything. It was the perfect day — until it wasn’t. Until I went to get my brother for dinner and found him no longer alive. Until my mom and I tried CPR on him to no avail. Until the paramedics arrived and tried to resuscitate him for 45 minutes. Until they stopped trying, and we were told that my baby brother had died by suicide.

Desi and Depressed: Living with Mental Illness in the South-Asian Community

I never wanted to die. I just wanted the nightmare to end.

I had a wonderful childhood. My parents immigrated from India in 1991, and worked hard to give my brother and I a great life in Cary, North Carolina. I got to fully explore both the Indian and American parts of my identity. I did gymnastics and garba-raas. I did Sanskar Gurukul and Kumon. I was student body vice-president and on the board for my temple youth group. In 2013, I graduated from high school in the top 10 percent of my class and started my bachelor's degree at Duke University. On the surface, my life was perfect.

Yet, despite my “perfect" life, when I was 13, I started having debilitating panic attacks. When I was 15, I got my formal diagnoses—Anxiety Disorder and Depression. It didn't make sense, but, like cancer or multiple sclerosis or any other chronic disease, mental illness usually doesn't make sense. The symptoms of my disease became a big part of my life. I would have periods of depression so bad that I could not physically move. I would have panic attacks so consuming that the only thing that seemed real to me were the voices in my head. I would become so overwhelmed by agony that the only way to make the symptoms stop seemed to be to kill myself. And I would attempt to—not once, but three times before my 21st birthday