My Lifelong Battle with Depression and Suicide

The Apocalypse
Suicide Page

Something About Me

Hi, I'm Roger and I'd like to tell you some things about myself. I am a 56-year old who has been involved with computers and the internet long enough that I remember having to get my first (winsock) program from a server in Australia.

Roger Wilkerson - Apocalypse Suicide Page, Depression My health history includes a lifelong battle with depression, including hospitalization, when I was young and many years of losing my battle with depression.

I have been a locksmith, a salesman and sales executive, and worked in a photo processing lab. I have been a maintenance man, worked in retail, owned my own business, been unemployed and homeless, done some carpentry, and sold seafood on a roadside from a truck. I have tried drugs and alcohol, and managed to stop; mental health professionals helped me for about a year with group therapy to get my life back together. I know what depression can do and what it does to people. I have had numerous significant others since my divorce in 1980, and I have someone in my life now that is so significant I'll probably keep her. <grin> We've been together for 4 (good) years.

My life has changed so much in the last 5 years that I almost don't recognize me. In July of 1995, my son David committed suicide. I had not been the father to him that I wish I could have been. Again, depression was a factor, and divorce was too. There are a lot of other factors, and the biggest was that David had depression too. He had married a German girl, and that marriage was failing. It seems that probably pushed him over the edge. When I looked back over his life, I saw a victim - over and over. I had not been there for him while he went through his teen years, and frankly, I didn't know how to help myself much less help him.

Although my parents are still alive, I can tell you that nothing in my whole life hurt more than my son's death. Suicide is a waste. A terrible waste. After his death, I began to research why he died. The "why" is an unanswerable question in suicide because there are so many different factors that add up to make a person feel so bad as to kill themselves. But I tried to answer "why". Why would he do that? Why?

There are too many answers, and there are no answers. I still searched. What happened was that I finally got some group therapy for suicide survivors (those who have lost someone to suicide). Other people shared their heartbreak with me, and I shared mine with them. It is an unbelievable help to be able to get those things about suicide out in the open and share them with people that understand our grief. The social workers/group moderators gave us guidance, and we used a lot of tissues soaking up tears. What I found was that you and I are in the same boat, and my pain and your pain are the same. Grief can be a great equalizer when it is shared, and the sharing helps us to go through the grief easier. Like someone said, you might have to go through it, but you don't have to do it by yourself (same applies to depression).

Well, I had a lot of knowledge about suicide, and my son was dead. What I knew couldn't help him. Nothing could help him. So what good did it do for me to learn about depression and suicide? I benefited from what I had learned, but the knowledge would now be wasted. What was the use in my knowing it? I decided that since I had all this information about suicide, I would make a website and help people that were (are) in trouble and in danger of dying. So in 1995, I set up the Apocalypse site. One single page. The same page that is now the main or home page. Since then, there have been a lot of people helped by the site, and I have learned a lot from them about their feelings and their strengths and weaknesses. For the last year-and-a-half, I have been semi-retired, and have helped other people "full-time".

Currently, I take medicine to help me overcome my depression. There are a lot of other ways I have changed my life and there are many tips that I can offer you to help you win your battle against your depression. My entire life has been so improved for the better because my understanding of the world and my place in it. Some of that picture has been changed because I see my world through the eyes of someone helping other people instead of seeing it as someone who is a taker, and is only out for himself. I have learned to defend myself from people who would take advantage of me. And then, well, just see the site, there is much more of me there and I hope you will understand more about who I am and by doing so, I hope to see you changing for the better also. We just have to unlearn some things that hurt us and then learn better ways of coping with the world. We can do that, and we can be much happier even if we have depression.

I appreciate you coming by and I hope to "see" you often.

Roger

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