America's Nightmare

Depression is America’s nightmare. More than 20 million of our neighbors, friends, or family members carry it around with them more days than they’d care to admit. Maybe it affects you, your work, your relationships, your most quiet and intimate moments with yourself, seeping like dirty engine oil through cracks in everything you do.

It can rob us of our sleep, our figures, our health. It’s a cancer, not a straightforward response to anything in particular at all but just something that is, like weather. Depression is a self-rewinding movie about everything that is wrong with your world, everything you perceive is wrong with you.

It is … being broken.

To talk about depression is to open a pathway to your deepest, darkest places — where even you don’t want to go — and say, “here, have a look around, but I wouldn’t take anything with you when you leave, if I were you.” And yet talking about depression is one of the healthiest things we can do, one of the most courageous things we can do, even when so many depressed Americans don’t.

How refreshing it is, then, to find someone talking so openly and frankly about her depression, to more than a million people. This obviously seems right for popular YouTube vlogger Laci Green. Perhaps what she has to say will seem right to you or someone you care about. As Robin Williams, who committed suicide a year ago yesterday after a long bout with depression, once said: “You’re only given a little spark of madness; if you lose that you’re nothing.”

(Warning: Certain language in the video below may offend some people.)