STEPHEN FRY

hmm before saying anything about my own experiences, i'll try and learn a little more about the play...or, can you tell us a little more about it? what types of info would help?

there's a great book called "the day the voices stopped" by ... ken steele that you could flip through, too. it's an autobiography and he's not a writer by trade, so it's pretty straightforward narrative. anyways, he has schizophrenia... and there's several places in it where he describes being suicidal, but it's different from the usual suicide-awareness info. for him it was very much due to psychosis wearing him down. (which i can relate to...) at one point you just think "geezuss he must be so damn exhausted!"

A good book that is very teeny if you want to understand more about depression is called DARKNESS VISIBLE BY WILLIAM STYRON. Took me half an hour to read but totally nails it.

I've read 4:48 PSYCHOSIS (be careful with your spelling there) so I am familiar with the piece. Everything you really need to know is in the text, helped by that book I described. You need to put in the reading time. If you do that I'll answer any questions you have.

Oh and know that Kane did not die as she finished the book as so many would have us believe, on an OD of lofepramine. She died 2 days later in a psych hospital by hanging herself.

Disturbing at times, what I know,
KSx

It depends on the type of depression. Some people only have one episode and then it is called major depression (they are too ill to work etc). If they keep having these major depression episodes then it is called unipolar depression, and yes, it comes and goes like in bipolar disorder. But there is also an illness called dysthymia where a person is almost constantly depressed, but only mildly, not enough to stop them getting on with their lives.

For most people unipolar depression is the case. But you have to remember each case is different. Some people might be ok most of the time, some people may spend the majority of their time depressed, it varies person to person.

KSx

Suicide, in my case, is something that I do not wish to do. However, when the noise comes, I cannot help but picture a gun against my temple, a bullet penetrating my brain, because that is where the noise is. I think it would be so much easier to breathe and open my eyes if I could just kill the pain and the static and the noise that drowns out everything rational. Sometimes I imagine downing a bottle a sleeping pills because the noise keeps me awake. Sometimes I do just want to die. I can't hear the good thoughts anymore when it gets too loud. Killing myself would not be something culminated from years of depression...it would be sudden...not a decision, but a sudden act precursered by a seemingly endless session of the deepest despair. Nothing was ever good and nothing will ever get better. I KNOW this. What I feel right now will never end unless I kill the noise. It's so loud. I can feel it reverberate through my whole body. My head is killing me. Please just make it stop. I just want this to stop. A simple movement of my index finger on a trigger could end it all. It would be so simple. I don't care if there's an afterlife. I'm already in hell. I'm not even thinking about the people who will hurt if I kill myself because I can barely see there faces through the pain. It would be so easy. I could just end this right now. No more pain. It would be quiet. I just want it to be quiet. I just want it all to be still. It's not even a question any more of whether or not I want to die. I just want the pain to stop. Please, I just want it to stop.

That's how I felt when I was suicidal. If it helps, prop wise I guess, I have journals that are interspersed with such writings where the letters getter bigger and bigger until I can only fit a few words on a page. Sometimes the pen was dragged through the page. I wanted to say something, but all I could feel was wordless and raging.
Why didn't I kill myself? Sometimes, I don't know. I didn't have gun or sleeping pills? Hanging just seems like it would have taken more preparation than I had the energy for. I could always just fall asleep in the car where it was cold. Away from anyone. I could take comfort in the distraction of discomfort. And maybe even freeze to death.
Mostly what went through my mind were lound, repetitive non-thoughts. Always about the pain and the noise. It was always loud.
I've heard there are many people who plan there suicide and are even more at peace and almost happy in the preceding days. I never wanted to be suicidal. It's horrifying. ...I just wanted it to stop. I use to sob, beg it to stop out loud. "Please stop...please stop," while I held my head together in my hands because I knwew it was coming apart. It was horrifying.
I hope this helps. Suicide is so often call a selfish act and, while it may seem like it is the those left in the wake, it's not like someone said, "Hey, I guess I don't care about the poeple who love me, so I'm just going to off myself for some pithy reason. No. Suicide, at least as far as I can tell, is an act of desperation.

Desdemona said:
Hello my darlinga,
I don't mean to be insensitive, or pry in any way, But i was wonder if you could help me.
I'm doing a play called 4.48 phycosis by Sarah Kane, a brilliant writer who unfortunatly killed herself after writing it due to sever depression.
I want to know what she felt and what kind of mind set she was in due to the illness, so i was wondering because your all kind and wonderfull if you could help me out with this please?
Maybe by posting some experiances you or someone else has had, feelings and so on.

If you could help i would very much appreciate it.
Thankyou.
XxX

Hi Desdemona,

Two ways of looking a psychosis/depression...

For me, psychosis (mania and depression) made me see that it is heavily connected to what we think of as 'dreams'. My mania was like a slow dissolving from reality, into a more loose mental state.

First - how does the brain work? From the first moments of our lives, our brains are storing away sense memories, and also storing away the relevance of each memory to other memories.

For example, if you think of an oven, and the experience of burning your hand. There's a whole string of identifiers in there - oven, white, metal, hard, hot, hand, pain etc.

And each of these has a connections to other sense memories - metal = oven, car, tin, spoon, gold, filing cabinet, bicycle frame etc etc.

So it's like one giant lattice of associations. Behaviours all come with socialised connections ie. sex = private etc.

I think of an analogy of a musical instrument like a guitar, with vibrating strings, that can resonate with each other.

So mania was like all the strings being in tune, and 'excitable' - everything that you sense, in turn vibrates into many other associations. Numbers with numbers, thoughts with other thoughts etc.

Depression is like someone has their hand resting on the guitar strings, so everything falls flat, with no connections with anything else - apart from fear - my theory is that depression is like the 'fear' node is overly dominant - so everything seems connected with blackness.

It's not rational - it's a dysfunctional brain state.

Like judasishmael said - suicide is like wanting to stop a traumatic mental state, much more than it is a rational response. There's many people in the world living in extremely desperate situations, but they won't be depressed unless their brain chemistry has become dysfunctional.

Even that is debatable - I think my brain knew that my mania was getting out of control, and my depression was it's attempt to 'put out a fire'.

The second part is about the connection to the 'dream state'. The dream state is very like mania - in fact I think mania is pretty much like your brain withdrawing slowly from reality - and the random association part of the brain starts to take over more and more. I think that's why people sleep less - the body is getting very confused about whether it asleep or awake.

When people ask about responsbility for bipolar actions, I often say to people - if you were held morally, and legally responsible for what you do in your dreams, would that be fair or reasonable?

Which leads to the conclusion - what if we're effectively always dreaming - even when awake. It's just that waking reality floods our senses with cue from the world that makes our brain process more stable.

Except in the case of mental illness, the sense stimulation is decreased, and our brain association process is increased - a sense of confusion, or unrealistic thoughts.

It's a theory that seems to fit a lot of different conditions.

Our kidneys sometimes are dysfunctional - we called it diabetes and there is no blame associated with it. Why people should think brains are perfect, but people's 'personalities' are flawed goes all the way back to mind/body Dualism, and organised religions idea of the 'soul' and 'being moral'.

Turns out these ideas are the ones which are highly flawed - and are the reason why life is hell for so many people with mental health conditions.

Interesting stuff, always looking for something to read.

Vx