But I do expect people to behave like mature adults and recognize when they are pushing things on other people.
It’s the difference between asking for help or support and expecting it to be there and being upset when it isn’t.
The bitch, please was not because she’s depressed and I expect her to magically get over it (I don’t) but because she’s an expectant, selfish twat. If she had asked for help instead of just expecting it, I’d be more sympathetic.
Completely skipping all the rest of this interesting discussion, I have to address these lines here. I’m going to try to do so in a nice way, but I’m probably not going to succeed very well, because this is a big old red button for me.
People who are chemically depressed, even outside of anything at all in their life affecting them and/or causing depressive feelings, frequently cannot just ask for support. This is in fact one of the symptoms of that type of depression, an inability to reach out to others in any way for assistance.
For all that you (iwanttobebutterflies) claim to have experienced depression, I’m going to be cruel here and say no. No, you haven’t. You’ve obviously had a shit time in life and been screwed quite hard by social stuff, but you would not be able to say what you have said there if you had ever experienced that kind of chemical depression.
It is a horrible, sucking, gripping — no. I can’t even put it into words. I don’t want to. Nobody should feel it, even vicariously. But it is characterized by an inability to ask for help, to reach out, in some cases even by an inability to even recognize that you are suffering an illness and not just a horrible person.
Yes, you’re right in one thing: she was expectant, and selfish.
Don’t you dare say that like it was a bad thing. People have a right to be expectant regarding folk around them noticing how they feel and react to the world. People have a right to put themselves ahead of other folk occasionally. Does it cause problems? Fuck yes. It always will; we aren’t mindreaders and we all live in bone cages.
I’m expressing some of this very poorly. But in short, to say that “It’s the difference between asking for help or support[,] and expecting it to be there and being upset when it isn’t.” is to completely and utterly misconstrue Hester’s issues, and to wholly misunderstand what depression actually is.
Hester didn’t ask for help in a way other than suicide because she was not capable of doing so. It’s that simple.