Young Writers Society

I'm not sure this quit fits here, but i'll give it a try. I got by English exams coming up soon, and I plan on writing a fictional story evolving around mental illness. Focusing on the state of depression and anxiety attacks since this is what I got the most personal experiences around.

The thing is; I need some inspiration. So does anybody have any good descriptions of what it feels like to want to die? Metaphors that are in one or another way sort of depressing? Maybe you know about a great novel or short story that might can give me some advice? Or maybe you've written a great paragraph yourself you think I might will like?

I'm sorry if anybody finds it triggering that i choose to write about this. The reason is simply to get things sort of out of my chest, and write about something I care about and as a plus maybe my teachers will understand my depression better?

So, anybody got advices?

No worries. This thread of yours definitely fits here.

Since you have firsthand experience and one of your goals is to help people to understand your depression a little better, I would suggest worrying less about how other people describe depression and focus more on figuring out how you would describe your own experiences.

The thing is, not everyone experiences depression in the same way, and so how one person would describe depression, descriptive and compelling as it may be, might not even apply to your own experiences with depression.

One of the other downsides of mining others' descriptions and metaphors is that they are other peoples' descriptions, and if enough people use those same descriptions, then those descriptions become trite and cliche. If you really want to make an impression, your best bet is to find a way to describe your experiences that is uniquely yours. Something that might help you with this process is writing poetry, because the lifeblood of poetry is unique and vivid descriptions that the audience can relate to.

Another option is to write up your first draft and post it on YWS for critique. Just be aware that reviews can be quite harsh, especially on a topic like depression which a lot of members have firsthand experience with (and see misrepresented a lot), so you'll want to prepare yourself for your writing getting picked apart. Something that might help focus your reviewers is to mention your goals for the piece at the start, so that your reviewers can analyze whether or not you achieved your goals as well as providing suggestions on how to achieve those goals more effectively.

If you do go the route of posting your writing on here, I know a few excellent reviewers and poets who can help you refine your descriptions and imagery that I could point towards you.

Truth be told, the crux of it isn't that you feel like dying, it's more like you feel there's no use in living anymore (which then eventually turns into not wanting to live anymore).

Try looking up nihilism. It'll give you a decent idea of what I'm talking about.

There are many different reasons a person might want to die, and if you want to explore the more philosophic avenues I'd take SparringPanther's advice and get into existentialist writings. Try Nausea by Sartre and Steppenwolf by Hesse; for something trending nihilistic, watch The Sopranos.

If the main impetus is clinical depression, then it's simple -- the pain of living outweighs the fear of death. A description that gets passed around on the internet a lot is this one by David Foster Wallace:

DFW wrote:The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.