Depression the Disease

Matt Walsh recently blogged about the tragic suicide of Robin Williams, suggesting his death was solely by choice, not due to the disease that is depression.

I find this viewpoint troubling.

Suicide. A terrible, monstrous atrocity. It disturbs me in a deep, visceral, indescribable way. Of course it disturbs most people, I would assume. Indeed, we should fear the day when we wake up and decide we aren’t disturbed by it anymore.

Walsh's point seems to be to stir the pot and compel people who suffer from depression to chime in, along with their counterparts who believe depression can simply be shaken off like dust or debris. Certainly, many bloggers in the political arena do this and make considerable bank through advertising along the way.

I intend to stick to one question, though. Does suicide not equate freedom:

It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it? Chesterton said, “The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” Where is the freedom in that?

Suicide is, ultimately, a selfish act, an act of indulgence, where one sees no other options and succumbs to the one that appears to be the only one left. Yet does suicide not free the sufferer from the shackles of their depression?

Yes, it does.

Depression, insidiously, narrows one's outlook on life so drastically that it seems like the only viable option. Similar to being trapped in a deep, dark hole, all you can see is emptiness above. All the rich landscape of one's life, their loves, interests, hopes, dreams, are stuck above the lip of this hole, a sort of event horizon. Unreachable, out of sight, out of mind.

A person in this frame of mind cares not about loved ones, much less society or humanity. Far from it. Suicide to this person is a means to an end, the end of their pain. At least, in most cases nowadays.

In ancient Japan, samurai who failed their masters might be compelled to perform ritual suicide or seppuku. 

Seppuku (切腹, "stomach-cutting", "abdomen-cutting") is a form of Japanese ritual suicide by disembowelment. Seppuku was originally reserved only for samurai. Part of the samurai bushido honour code, seppuku was either used voluntarily by samurai to die with honour rather than fall into the hands of their enemies (and likely suffer torture), or as a form of capital punishment for samurai who had committed serious offenses, or performed for other reasons that had brought shame to them. 

In this there are elements of spirituality and practicality. On one hand is the bushido code which holds honor in high esteem and is bound to the warrior's soul. On the other is the simpler wish to evade capture and potentially suffer and be compelled to reveal secrets at the hands of one's enemies, at the expense of their superiors and subordinates.

A combat general, tried and tested on the field of battle, is an asset not to be squandered, and yet numerous such generals would take their own life in the face of failing their leader. Why?

The honor, discipline, and spiritual landscape embraced by samurai generals long past is outside the scope of this discussion. But indeed, seppuku, the act of suicide, is undoubtedly a choice; taking a razor-sharp blade and slicing back and forth to disembowel oneself isn't something someone of sound mind and body would do. It is, though, what someone mired in depression might.

We tend to look for the easiest answers. It makes us feel better to say that depression is only a disease and that there is no will and choice in suicide, as if a person who kills themselves is as much a victim as someone who succumbs to leukemia.

Thing about depression is, it kneecaps one's ability to see beyond the crisis in the now. Past and future are meaningless, only the present matters, and that bleak present is what can lead one to that final, ultimate choice. Depression is the monster that chips away at the individual, bit by bit, and saps them of hope. 

To suggest that the suicide victim's final decision in committing to end their human life is separate from the disease that is depression seems naive. It is a decision made under extreme duress, obscuring outside influence and internal dialog that could pull them out of this tailspin of despair.

If a deeply depressed person could suddenly disable their depression, step outside themselves and judge themselves without prejudice, they'd likely find ample reason not to commit. That this is often hardly possible without outside intervention speaks to the notion that a person in that situation is incapable of choosing something other than a most expedient, tragic route to end their suffering once and for all.

Matt Walsh doesn't know depression, rather, he looks at it at arm's length like a dark jewel, curious and wanting to exploit its darkness for profit in the wake of a celebrity's passing who suffered from this disease.


#RIPRobinWilliams

Google +1 Button: Instant SEO

Google's new +1 button is the information innovator's response to the fairly ubiquitous Facebook, StumbleUpon, and other icons that let you promote content you find useful. I noticed that Google incorporated this feature into my search results as well, so I decided to experiment.

A popular blog post of mine describing a DIY screen protector for the Viewsonic G Tablet appears at spot #9 among my Google search results as shown below:

Note the greyed out +1 button just to the right of the link title, which animates tantalizingly as you hover over the search result. I went ahead and clicked it, essentially voting my link up in the rankings. Here's the result:

From the #9 to the #5 spot with one click?? I'll take it! You also receive a notification just below and to the left indicating that you've +1'd a given link.

I don't know whether "+1'd" has as catchy a ring to it as "Liked", but if it brings more traffic to my site, then I'm all for it!

Blogger Blog Post Title Optimization

I've blogged with Blogger for a few years now, and overall it's worked pretty smoothly, but the blog post title can be a bit awkward to work with.

You'll notice that if your post title is particularly long, the resulting URL will get truncated once the post is published to a maximum length of roughly 39 characters. Spaces will be replaced with dashes, stop words like "to", "and", "of" will be filtered, and punctuation will be omitted.

Principles of SEO demand that blog posts are crafted such that search engines will return links to them as relevant hits for a given search. In addition, it is helpful to make it so that the blog post title is similar to the actual URL of the post.

In a Blogger blog, you can optimize your blog post titles by first deciding on a title which is both meaningful and concise. The title should reflect the content of the post, to make it easier for search engines (particularly Google) to categorize what you're blogging about, and decide how high up in the search results to place it. 

For example, if the title of your post is "How To Make Lots Of Money By Blogging On Random Topics" (which is 54 characters without quotes), try to distill the essence of your post into a title which meets or is under the 39 character limit, perhaps "Make Money Blogging Random Topics" (33 characters) or "HowTo Make Money Blogging Randomly" (34 characters). 

Ideally, you want the post title to meet that character limit for Blogger post titles, but sometimes it's difficult, particularly with stop words and spaces eating of valuable post title real estate. 

To mitigate this, you can try the following steps:

1. Create a blog post with as brief a title as possible.
   
2. Publish the post with the brief title.
   
3. Immediately after publishing, Edit your post and modify the title to your original, more verbose version.

After doing this, you'll discover that Blogger keeps the concise title's wording in the URL, but in the post itself it will have your verbose title. 

Again, it's probably best that the title be the same in both the URL and the actual post title, but if you just can't do your post justice by pruning it below 39 characters, you can at least ensure that the post URL meets that requirement and yet retains value from an SEO standpoint.