____T.H.E. .P.A.S.S.

____When The Limits Are Reached...

I sit here and contemplate sleeping. But upon reflection of the events of the past couple of days, I just cannot bring myself to do that. I just had to pen my thoughts down before everything becomes vague memory.

Terrible news struck when I heard of a friend from hall who chose death as a causatum to what appeared to be problems deemed unsolvable to him. Instant shock and disbelief took over as I tried to come to terms with the piece of information.

The passing of someone naturally creates sorrow amongst those around him with no regards to the closeness of the friendship, myself included. I do remember him as a friendly, helpful person who advised me on how to handle my recent ankle injury as well as also being a capable leader in terms of hall activities.

Intrigued by how the many close friends of his failed to notice and prevent the tragedy, I searched websites with regard to suicide and depression. I brought myself to a startling piece of statistic - It is estimated that 8-25 attempted suicides occur for every suicide completion. Many of these are never discovered, or never reported. It is important to understand that the majority of suicide attempts are expressions of extreme distress, not merely bids for attention (quoted from www.emedicine.com). It shocked me to realise the difficulty in identifying the symptoms of a depression.

Difficult because how do you judge an action as a symptom of depression or just a medium to seek attention? Just by looking at the nicks of all the people on my MSN list, I read stuff like "sigh", "alone in the world of my own", "tired" and many other negative nicknames. It is human nature to wallow in self pity? Is it a call for attention? Or should we identify it as a call for help?

Whatever the case is, I believe it is good to be on the safe side and sometimes just give someone a "hi, how are you?" when you have the slightest tinge of suspicion that this person might be going through a bad state of depression. Thus, I am thankful to those who have given me the encouragement and fight to go on during the bad patches that I have gone through.

While I am determined to make sure such a tragedy doesn't happen to the people around me again, I am equally inclined to hope and believe that Toon has finally found the peace that eluded him during his short short span in this world.

Find peace...

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