Though this was featured as the song of the day on the 16th, it deserves a much larger feature and it falls perfectly into the sentiment of today's posts; "Gone Away" and "Crash" both admit those feelings of depression, but they both beg suicide prevention.
According to reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rising suicide rates in the US have resulted in more people dying from suicide than car accidents since 2010. Suicide is the eleventh most common death (third most common death among young people; on average, a young adult commits suicide every two hours and twelve minutes, with an estimated 100-200 attempts for every death) with over 30,000 deaths annually; five million living Americans have made a suicide attempt at some point and, while there are three female suicide attempts to every one male suicide attempt, male suicide attempts are generally more lethal, resulting in higher suicide rates among men than women.
During LGBT history month, and with projects like It Gets Better and The Trevor Project hard at work, it's important to note that gays teens are 8.4 times more likely to report having attempted suicide, 5.9 times more likely to report experiencing serious depression than other young adults, 1/5 of gay teens have been physically assaulted because of their sexual orientation and 2/3 have been sexually harassed, making them five times more likely to commit suicide than their peers.
On average, each suicide will intimately affect at least six people.
It's easy to say that you're feeling depressed if you have not seen the symptoms of depression in someone you love and I will be the first to admit to being that ignorant; I believed I was depressed at a time in high school when I felt like I was just jumping from one funeral to the next, but that was a cause and effect case and, as the cause was easy to find, it was, over time, easy to pull myself out of there without help from professionals or medicine. Real depression, however, is a disorder that is not easy to overcome.
My youngest sister has been fighting depression for several years now, seeing psychologists, psychiatrists, body talk therapists, and testing different drug amounts, looking for the right balance, but nothing really seemed to click until she found an artist who understood her feelings perfectly. She found Watsky some time last year, shortly before his album, Cardboard Castles, was released, and insisted I listen to one song in particular: "Hey, Asshole". Of course, I listened to the song once, then focused instead on "Sloppy Seconds" without going back and really listening to the lyrics or watching the video (for "Hey, Asshole") until I featured it as last Wednesday's song of the day, and I wish I had spent more time listening to the song earlier .
Lyrics that state "don't want to panic, but I got to come clean, because the plan of the planet is just mean, knew it was tough, but dammit it's obscene" and "I've been using a pool of water as a mirror but not for style, it's so I can reach in and pimpslap my reflection for acting childish, spend a half an hour, sitting at the bottom of my shower, letting the water run over my body, and dammit I wanted to get up, but I didn't have the power" are an open admission of depression, but "don't you ever forget why you get up and you put one foot in front of the next" state that you just have to keep moving through it, because, eventually, you will be able to pull yourself out and make it to the other side. My sister's favorite lines have been "I know I'm good and able, but I don't have the strength to get up from the kitchen table" and "gotta take a bitter pill, gonna pay for what I did to my head and my heart'll foot the bill... and I'll be working on myself, til I work on someone else, til I get there I'ma just pretend"; mindless of the perfectly sunny disposition portrayed by the instrumentation, the honest lyrics are amazing and, because he played a major role in bringing my baby sister back, Watsky is, quite probably, my favorite artist of all time.
If you're feeling depressed, reach out to someone (you can even email me if you want) and tell them how you feel, because someone loves you and it will tear them apart if you end your life.
"Hey, Asshole" Watsky featuring Kate Nash
- E
