I saw something new in my social media pages; a shirt which has a message like this on the back:
To the person behind me.
Your life matters.
Sincerely, the person in front of you.
There are others as well, including one which says it’s okay to just do nothing in a day, suggesting that as long as you got through it, you’re okay and can pick up again tomorrow.
All of this is designed to help with mental health or depression awareness, and lessen the staggering numbers of people who leave this world by their own hands.
I don’t know if this works as it is supposed to.
The person in front of you is allegedly a stranger, so they don’t know who you are. A depressed individual is more in need of validation from somebody familiar to them, from whom the sentiment matters. “You matter” from somebody you don’t know may have the same effect as, “That will be $10.98.”
Our awareness and actions pertaining to depression and death by one’s own design don’t seem to be helping to lessen the numbers. In 2022, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention noted a 2.6 percent increase in self-inflicted deaths, and in 2021 there was a five percent increase. Nearly 49,050 people left this earth in that manner last year.
On the good news side of those statistics, young people ages 10 to 24 did not show up in the counts as much as before, and indigenous Indian deaths dropped by over six percent.
There is a number, 988, staffed 24 hours a day for those in crisis, but do people who are that deeply depressed going to respond to a stranger’s reassurances? Once that phone call ends, the person is back where they started from; alone with demons determined to hold them hostage and ruin their lives.
And no validation from somebody who matters to them.
The cruelest thing we do to each other is ignore. We have trained ourselves via social media and the entertainment industry to embrace the perfection behind a ton of makeup and surgery, laugh at the foibles of the “plain” folks and avert our eyes at everything else. This goes for ugly things as well, such as our growing trash problem; if we don’t look at it, maybe it will go away, we think.
Unfortunately, the things in life which are not our idealistic vision of perfection still exist, and they need tending to. The trash displacing our oceans will bring the tides up into our coastal residences, and the person we ignore just because they aren’t our ideal may end up departing this earth by themselves, or they may cause mayhem and hope the police will do it for them. People in pain need people to help alleviate that pain. This means taking the time to turn around and look at the person behind you and managing to say hello to them. That one word can make their lives matter much more than the throw-away saying on a shirt.
It came from a human voice.
It came from the heart.
And both can walk away beating a little lighter because of it.
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