Inspiring Stories of People who battled Suicide and Depression

In the world which is slowly becoming more aware of depression and mental health issues, we often correlate them with some of the other problems that one faces in their life. The statistics have been increasing at an alarming rate. However, what about the people whom we believe that they have got everything that they could have asked for, such as, celebrities or influencers. Do they also suffer from depression? Do they also feel lonely or insecure? Let us see about three different celebrities from three different areas of work in which they excelled.

An Actor

“Struggle and pain is real. I was devastated and depressed,”

Dwayne Johnson

‘The Rock’ in an interview, opened up about the lowest moment of his life. “I reached a point where I didn’t want to do a thing or go anywhere. I was crying constantly,” he said. He told the news outlet several devastating moments in his life and later tweeted the vital lesson he learned during surviving those days.

“We all go thru the sludge/shit, and depression never discriminates,” he wrote. “Took me a long time to realize it but the key is to not be afraid to open up.”

Talking about his initial days, he had witnessed his parents struggling to make their ends meet when they were thrown out of their apartment and had their car taken away. “We were living in an efficiency that cost $120 a week,” he said. “We come home, and there’s a padlock on the door and an eviction notice. My mom starts bawling. She just started crying and breaking down. ‘Where are we going to live? What are we going to do?’”

At the age of 15, he watched his mother attempting suicide. She survived though, but the whole event left a significant impact on her son. “What’s crazy about that suicide attempt is that to this day, she has no recollection of it whatsoever. Probably best she doesn’t,” Johnson said.

His thoughts were not limited just to his teen years. Even while he was in college, his performance stumbled. He dropped out in the very first semester and had a GPA of 0.7. However, the incident with his mother gave him enough strength to not commit or even think of doing anything like that.

“We both healed, but we’ve always got to do our best to pay attention when other people are in pain,” Johnson said. “We have to help them through it and remind them they are not alone.”

An Olympic Medalist Swimmer

“I didn’t want to be alive anymore,”

Michael Phelps

The swimmer opened up about his own story with depression during a Mental Health Conference in Chicago. He talked more than 20 minutes about his battle with Anxiety, Depression, and Suicidal thoughts.

Talking about the qualities one requires to be an Olympic Medalist, a Champion; he exclaimed that the dedication, the hard work, the will to never give up is the easiest part.

He recalled his first defeat in his first Olympics by half a second in 2000 at 15. A boy desperately worked hard with his coach, making numerous sacrifices only to come back home empty-handed. “I was always hungry, hungry, and I wanted more,” said Phelps. “I wanted to push myself really to see what my max was.”

He acknowledges that after nearly every Olympics, he used to feel the lowest, that he was not right, moreover nothing seemed to interest him anymore. In 2004, he was charged with driving under substance influence. Then there was another picture of him from 2008, the year he won 8 gold medals at the Beijing Olympics, smoking from a Bong. He fell into the sinking pit of drugs and substance abuse. He considered drugs to be an escape from his thoughts, however, which led to their overuse.

The “hardest fall” came after the 2012 Olympics when he didn’t want to be in the sport anymore, that he did not want to be alive anymore. He used to sit alone for three to five days a week in his bedroom, not to eat, barely sleeping and just thinking of how not to live until one day when he realized that he needs help.

Michael Phelps Foundation has implemented stress management into their programs. He understands that it is OK not to be OK and that the stigma around mental illness makes the whole topic a taboo, and it is something that we still deal with every day.

“That’s the reason why suicide rates are going up — people are afraid to talk and open up,” said Phelps. “Those moments and those feelings and those emotions for me are light years better than winning the Olympic gold medal,” he added.

“I am extremely thankful that I did not take my life.”

A President

I must die sometime

Abraham Lincoln

The Liberator suffered from what we diagnose as depression. However, exploring this side of his life distinguishes the lessons we learn from his life. It could be said that our own thoughts need therapy—of melancholy as a solely clinical illness. With Lincoln, we have a man whose downturn prodded him, agonizingly, to look at the centre of his spirit. In addition, whose hard work to remain alive helped him create significant abilities and limits, even as his downturn waited hauntingly; moreover whose only character took extraordinary quality from the piercing bits of knowledge of wretchedness, the innovative reactions to it, and a feeling of humble assurance produced over many years of profound misery and sincere yearning.

In 1835, a pandemic of what scientists called “bilious fever”— typhoid, presumably—spread in New Salem, a town in focal Illinois that upheld up to a feign over the Sangamon River where Lincoln had lived for four years. As a result to which, in August of 1835, a friend of him, Ann Rutledge she became ill. Around the hour of her death, a rainstorm, joined by untimely chilly, pushed him over. After that event, he appeared to be significantly transformed, he appeared to be Retired, and adored Solitude, he appeared to be enveloped by the significant idea, indifferent to the latest events, had however Little to state, yet would take his weapon and stray in the forested areas without anyone else, away from the relationship of even those he generally regarded, this misery appeared to extend for quite a while, to offer uneasiness to his companions as to his mind.

Was Lincoln’s despairing “clinical depression”? To the extent, that idea goes. His condition in 1835 matches what the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders names a major depression episode. The discouraged state of mind portrays such a scene, a stamped decline in joy, or both, for at any rate fourteen days, and manifestations, for example, disturbance, weakness, sentiments of uselessness, and contemplations of death or self-destruction.

At the same time, he was climbing up the ladder of success, developing as a pioneer of the Illinois Whig Party and a sharp, self-taught youthful attorney. This juxtaposition may appear to be astounding today, nineteenth-century, the origination of despairing, expert and misery were frequently essential for a similar general picture wherein an individual with a despairing personality had been destined with a fearful gift. The weight was a pity and sadness that could tip into a condition of infection. However, the blessing was a limit concerning profundity and insight.

Both sides of melancholy are evident in a poem on suicide that Lincoln wrote in his twenties. Discussed by his contemporaries but long undiscovered, the poem, unsigned, recently came to light. The evidence points strongly to Lincoln.

No evidence exists after which the depression ended, not in January of 1841, not during his middle age, and not at his political resurgence, starting in 1854. Whatever status Lincoln accomplished cannot be clarified as a victory over his problems, but it must be accounted for an outgrowth of a similar framework that created that misery. This is a story not of transformation but integration.

In other words, He did not solve his suicidal thoughts ever but instead fueled his work from these thoughts.

Edited By: Prapti Kakkar