A while ago I saw this post on Twitter:
To put it bluntly, I’m nosy. So of course I had to google it and find out what was going on.
Apparently our esteemed Mr Fry had publicly admitted to attempting an overdose. This struck a chord with me in many many ways. I’ve known for a while that Stephen Fry suffers from various mental issues. He is the patron or chairman or something of one of my favourite charities: MIND who deal with mental health issues.
It also struck a chord in that I have a history of overdoses and other suicide attempts myself. When I read about someone who means something to me experiencing such issues, I become concerned and interested. Then I found the article about which Alistair Campbell’s tweet refers.
The article itself is utterly innocuous. It’s the comments.
There is a discussion in there about how depression isn’t a disease. The guy’s reasoning is that it’s not a disease because there’s no test for it. Which is rubbish. He’s completely uninformed, but he represents a wide section of the population of the world that don’t think of depression as being a disease. And as someone who suffers from it, I find that incredibly insensitive.
There were a lot of comments like this. About how Stephen Fry was just performing a publicity stunt, and so on.
Personally, I find his admission to be inspirational. Knowing that successful, funny, intelligent, talented people like he are out there suffering from the same things I do… it makes me feel less alone.
