Alexander Kitsmarishvili

I’ve always been aware of how depressed the world and people my age are nowadays, and I’ve even dealt with a friend who was talking about taking his own life but for one reason or another, the severity and reality of depression never had sunk in for me. 

This all changed suddenly one weekend after the first semester of college. Before I talk about the day it happened I should introduce who it was. I met this friend in college and over the first couple months, she became my best friend, even though I also had a large group of old friends from high school who I spent a lot of time with. As we became close she opened up to me about her past, about how hard college has been for her, and about her depression. While I knew her I would find out when she was having a really bad day where she may have been suicidal but she always would talk to someone who she was with at the time and she would feel better. After a few months, it seemed to me that things were looking up for my friend’s mental health, but I’ve learned that a lot of the time that is only the calm before the storm. For one reason or another she just couldn’t catch a break and whenever something good would happen, so would another bad thing.

It was another one of those calm periods when this event took place. It was a Saturday before the second semester and I had the whole suite in my dorm to myself. I got to my dorm early in the day and was feeling good after getting completely situated so early. All of a sudden she calls me about hanging out in the city with a few friends. I was super excited to go but it was such an unexpected turn of events, I was planning on playing video games and eating halal in my underwear, not sitting on the Schuylkill river trail drinking mikes hard with 3 friends. All of us were in a decent mood but, in hindsight, she was a little off. 

Fast forward to me and her hanging out in my dorm. All of a sudden it’s 11 pm and she’s completely shut down, curled up in a ball, not moving or talking. By the I fully understood what was happening it was 12 am and it felt like it was too late, she told me with conviction she was going to take her life tonight and I thought I could do nothing to stop it other than not let her leave my sight. I was in hysterics having a panic attack while she sat there cold and lifeless. I had nobody to contact but somehow I managed to get her out of it and in contact with her brother. 

After that night the two of us became even closer and I had one big change in thinking. Depression is about more than just being sad, it seriously makes people hopeless and is scarily real. Ever since that day I’ve dealt with mental health super seriously because even if someone looks okay, I can never really know.