A side effect of depression is death. That seems exactly what seemed to happened to former NBC producer Eric Wishnie. The whole suicide scenario was very predictable. Wishnie lost his wonderful job, then his wife. It's also increasingly predictable that no one tried hard enough to reach in there and short-circuit this process. Call it Broken Networks. We simply don't care enough about our fellow human beings.
To access help, Wishnie probably would have had to go to a paid service, even if that was the local emergency room of a hospital. That wasn't always how it went.
I hit an emotional bottom in 1970 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. One after another, friends and even acquaintances came by to push me towards the reality that I needed treatment. I'm alive today. In 2003, when I again hit a type of bottom, this time like Wishnie about professional matters, caring didn't come to me. But I got to it, on my own. Wishnie had lost that capacity to save himself.
Maybe our society should stop working so hard and start returning to noticing when one of us is in such pain and reach in there.
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