In a Discord server, someone was feeling depressed and suicidal, and I suggested they get some sleep. They got mad at me. Then they explained their problems, which prompted this rather rude response from someone else to them:

This prompted me to write a rather long response to try to explain to both of them how depression works, which several people liked, and since then I've shared it with someone else who was depressed and they found it helpful too. So I'm posting it here to preserve it on the internet in case it can help more people.

The reason people want to kill themselves over things that seem trivial is because the depression comes first and the reasons come afterwards.

There's some kind of seizures for which the solution is to cut the brain in half down the middle. Since speech is done only on one side of the brain, this means that the other half of the brain can't speak. So they've done experiments where they tell one half of the brain to stand up, then after the person stands up, they ask them why they stood up. They never say "because you told me to" because the half of the brain that knows that can't speak. So the other half of the brain just makes something up. "I need to go to the bathroom" or "I'm cold so I want to get my jacket."

I think this happens in normal brains as well, in that many of our decisions are made subconsciously and so when we do something we can only guess as to why we did it. We can think "my bladder is full, so I should go to the bathroom," but we can also just subconsciously decide to stand up, and then wonder why we did, and if we feel that we have a full bladder, that's a good guess as to the reason, but we don't actually know the reason.

I think the same thing is going on with depression. Emotions aren't consciously decided upon. We know what they correlate with because often it's obvious, like if a pet dies and then you feel sad, it's kind of obvious that's why. However, when it comes to long-term sadness that sort of crept into your life, what triggered it is not obvious. So we guess. We list the saddest things we can think of that are present in our life and assume that they must be the cause.

Now the thing is that most people do have sad things in their life. So most of the time people can point to some things that don't seem unreasonable, even if they're rather common and don't lead to most people wanting to kill themselves. Now these still may not be the actual reason they're depressed, but they're at least reasons that people will believe. So it's hard to even try to tell people in this case that the source of their depression may be something else.

However, if you listen to the right people with the best lives, the best they can come up with is "my car is old and ugly and my dad won't buy me a new one" and they seem like a whiny spoiled brat for wanting to kill themselves over something so trivial. However, their depression is real. They're just wrong about what is causing it.

However, there's a huge problem in that the depression makes these people feel like these are major concerns. Why, after all, would they be so depressed, if these weren't actually major problems? So people aren't open to advice like "you need to rest and get some more sleep" because it seems like it's rejecting that their problems are real. ...but it's not rejecting their problems and it's not rejecting their depression, it's just rejecting the link that they believe exists between the two.

Like imagine they invent "depression pills," not pills to make you happy, but pills to make you depressed. If you took one, what do you think that experience would be like? We kind of know from people taking drugs that make them happy. They don't think "I'm so happy because I took this pill," they instead look at a cat licking itself and think "haha, that's so funny, life is awesome." In the same way, depression pills wouldn't make you think "I'm so sad that I took this pill," they would make you think "My dad won't buy me a new car. My parents hate me. My life sucks. I should kill myself." ...and you'll be thinking that the only solution to feeling so bad is that your parents start loving you and buy you a new car, when in reality, what you need to do is go to bed and give that depression pill some time to wear off.

That's depression. No matter how well off you are, it will force you to think of some reason you need to give up on life and end it, and if you're a normal person with normal problems in your life, the reasons you come up with won't even seem that unreasonable. The trick of it is that you can't see in the moment that, without the depression, you wouldn't be thinking that your problems are so impossible to overcome.

Like, over in Gaza, people are watching their friends and family starve to death, when they're not just getting shot or bombed. Why don't they kill themselves? ...because they don't have depression telling them that these are insurmountable problems and so they need to just end it all. They don't have depression telling them that the only things in life that matter are the sad things. So they still see reasons to live and they still have hope for a better future.

Depression is like some kind of evil demon that gaslights you into wanting to kill yourself.