Here's how we are all part of a great happiness cult

Every time I read about a suicide due to depression, a word flashes in my mind: relief. I believe people kill themselves when their emotional pain exceeds their power to deal with the pain. The emotional pain could be caused by extraneous factors — financial debt, trauma or incessant torture by family for delivering a baby girl — but once we take these factors aside and focus only on the internal emotional mess, we cannot help but confront a simple truth: for the victim it is an end to suffering, no matter what the humanist discourse all around us would like us to believe. 

For someone like me, more depressing than Robin William’s suicide has been the reaction to his death. It pains me to see that some of my most educated and highly opinionated friends choose to treat mental and emotional pathologies as superficially as they possibly can, patronising not just the dead but all those that live in the hope that they don’t end up killing themselves. A celebrity suicide injects reality into our lives. We are reminded of death in a dramatic fashion. Our grief has two stages: shock and relief. 

The first wave of reactions offered shock instead of sensitivity. On the pretext of offering online condolence people in my friend list wondered how could a man so funny take his own life. It was almost as if people were trying to calm themselves by behaving like a bunch of pigeons who heard a gunshot. The preachy friends went a step further and used adjectives like cowardly and weak to authenticate the act of suicide. The second wave of reactions comprised slightly longer posts, reminiscing about William’s movies, which they watched with friends or family. These posts too ended with a note of caution: every smile is a veil that hides a tear. The third and the most depressing wave came a day or two later. Tearing apart the first two waves, this one hailed Williams as a hero, a fighter who eventually succumbed to his nemesis. 

My problem with the depression discourse is that instead of helping us understand the disease better, it reinforces the stereotypes and works against the principles of harm reduction leading to a situation where we don’t know what we’re talking about when we talk about depression. 

It is only with a suicide that depression takes a serious form in the public consciousness. At other times, it is treated like the common cold of psychiatry. Almost everyone has some or the other kind of depression, we’re regularly told by newspapers, giving us the impression that perhaps it is not such a big deal after all. Yet it is a big deal, else why would people be killing themselves? 

An upshot of such ambivalence is that no one ever questions the doctor or the therapist looking after a suicidal patient. The brilliance of the psychiatric model is that it is never wrong. Every time a patient dies, it is assumed that the patient gave in to weakness. We never tend to say that oh so-and-so committed suicide, maybe we should think about what went wrong in therapy. Unlike conventional medicine where lapses on the part of the doctor are often quite visible, psychiatry enjoys a religious status of sorts with its unquestionable dogmas. If a patient gets better the credit goes to the doctor and if the patient commits suicide the credit goes to the patient. 

I firmly believe we are all part of a great happiness cult. For us happiness is everything. We equate living with happiness. Suicide in such a scheme confounds us. It creates an anxiety that demands instant resolution. Facebook helps. And that is quite depressing to me.