These maudlin portraits of suicides make me sick. They always follow the same script. Missed warning signs, attempts at help, wasted potential and a quick peek at the family's grief. And this one is even worse with the little one sentence stings at the end of the sections that are supposed to be weighty but come off as inappropriately saccharine. I can see the soft focus lens of sentimentality fall over every mental image as I read. It's emotional junk food that makes people think saying, "What a shame," for five seconds is a touching tribute before moving on to the next distraction.

The problem with this shit is the necessity of a news story is to provide a narrative when killing yourself due to clinical depression has no understandable story that anyone can follow except for what's inside the head of the victim and she's gone. You get some naive copywriter to try to fill in a story, create a empathetic pathway for the reader who is probably just as clueless about the difference between major depression and situational sadness and you're left with a few snapshots that get spit shined with some sympathy and a complete lack of understanding. I can honestly say if I read something like this written about me (uplifting, what's wrong, you have so much. not the death part) in an attempt to make me feel better while I was in the midst of a depressive episode it would make me angry and probably make me want to kill myself all the more.

If you have a serious mental illness, you're effectively isolated. Your brain did it, no one's going to be able to say or do anything to fix it and your brain, with maybe some lithium, is going to get you out of it. Or not.

If you've never been seriously depressed, psychotic, anxiety stricken, what you get when you talk about it is the other person telling you when they've felt that way when they've never even been in the ballpark. Or hemisphere relative to the ballpark. It takes a serious effort for someone outside these diseases to care enough to try to understand what it's like. These types of articles are simplified to the point of uselessness.

We get these tributes after an actor or pretty white girl dies and the average reader takes it as the kind of awareness of a problem that they should be proud of because it said "stigma of mental illness'"somewhere in the body of the article which made them feel good about a cause. A cause no one is doing anything about in earnest. There's an awful lot of these maudlin, feature length obituaries written though.