I think Manda JO has a good point. Maybe she is a self-centered twat, I’m not the one to say, but that’s one hell of a bombshell that was dropped on her. Not that Alex is probably taking it much better. A person can have depression for years and seem perfectly fine, until finally it all blows up in their face and they can’t hold it together anymore. Of course the good news is that there is treatment available, but they’re both going to have to re-evaluate their lives and where’s they’re going for Alex to get back on track with his life, and to decide if it’s best for Kate to stay or go.
I can’t get past this. YES IT DOES. That’s sorta the fucking point, eh?
No it fucking doesn’t. And that’s why a lot of people get so angry at people with depression because many of them can’t get past the fact that their actions affect other people.
This part is VERY important. This is the part Alex should address once he’s healthy enough to face his own personal demons.
Katie is just a symptom. She’s a self-centered twat, that’s obvious, he should disconnect from her at once. HOWEVER, this will NOT necessarily prevent Alex from replacing Katie with another self-centered twat who is much like Katie. He needs to recognize his attraction to self-centered twats, and learn the proper social tools to seek women who are not self-centered twats (hard to find, but they exist.)
Naturally, all this needs to wait until the crisis has passed. Good luck to both you.
It’s true, depressive people tend to act selfishly. However, MOST PEOPLE tend to act selfishly, and don’t recognize (or bother to consider) how their actions affect other people. Therefore, what you said is proof of nothing, except for being human.
Damn, y’all are heartless fucks.
A woman’s fiancee attempts suicide and you BLAME her for freaking out???
The point’s been made already - she’s got a right to react to the news. The man she’s going to build her life and family around suddenly wants to kill himself!
I can’t blame her for venting - sure, might not be helpful, but I can totally understand her worry. There’s no guide-book on how to react when your closest friend and lover decides to kill himself.
She’s scared, confused, bewildered - of course she’s worried about her future, who the fuck wouldn’t be?? She’s not got “dollar signs” in her eyes - she wants to know if her kids would have to cope without a father, and whether she’s one day going to walk into the house to find Alex lying dead.
It’s not gold-digging, it’s a 100% natural response to a massively traumatic event.
What she needs is a friend to talk things through with, so she can understand how best to help Alex… I hope she ditches the OP though, if this is how my friends reacted to my distress I’d not want their poison around.
The fuck it does. And I say this as someone who has suffered from depression in the past, as well as OCD.
There is a wrong way and a right way to go about “reading someone out”. It’s better to say, “You need to get help. I can’t be your form of therapy. I will not support this.”
I had a friend who was suffering from depression who WAS using me as his form of therapy. I had to cut ties-I had a life to live myself.
Once the diagnosis is made, the person needs to take responsibility for the illness, and for following the treatment plan.
Prior to the diagnosis being made, especially while the patient doesn’t know what the heck is going on, responsibility for their illness is much diminished, if not completely excused.
Of course, they need to be responsible for their actions at all times, unless actually psychotic. IMHO.
But the depressed person here is the one with the (previously undiagnosed) disease, and should be cut the most slack about not coping with it in the best way.
In my own experience it happens the other way around.
When the crisis is there, I can be enormously strong and upbeat and positive. It’s the day-to-day grind of living with the disease that eats away at my tolerance.
People aren’t the same, of course. But I think I do expect that if you love someone your first act is to attempt to comfort them, not to hurt them. The sort of resentment and fear that she’s talking about sound more like someone who has been harboring this resentment and fear for a while. In other words, it sounds more like someone who already knew that something was wrong who has had time to fuss and fume over it.
Again in my experience, that takes a while.
But she didn’t say “get over it”. She said, essentially, “Wake up, jackass, and realize that your actions affect a lot of people, not the least of which is me, the person you claim to love and trust more than anyone else in the world. Well, I’m pissed off that you didn’t love and trust me enough to let me help you, dammit! How am I supposed to love and trust someone who doesn’t seem to love and trust me? You want me to bring a child into this when you might off yourself and leave him fatherless with no warning? Screw that!”
It may not be “sanctioned” treatment, but it’s the only reason I’m alive today. If I hadn’t heard nearly the same speech, I would have tried again and kept it even quieter. For me, the worst part of being depressed was the knowledge that I didn’t matter, not to anyone, and that [dramatic sob] *nobody *would even *notice *that I was GONE! When it was made very clear to me, not through what felt like insincere pleading and reassurances, but through outrage and anger, that people WERE affected by what I was (and was not) doing, then the message finally got through.
I’m not saying it will for him or that she calculated the maneuver. But anger is now one of my tools for dealing with a suicidal crisis in a friend, and it’s saved several lives now.
I’m not on board with the Navy thing, however. Nobody should stay in a job that makes them miserable, nobody. There are too many other options to do that to yourself.
Wow, what a cunt this chick is. Not necessarily because she’s pissed off at someone for being ill and messing up her plans for her life in which he was supposed to be some kind of accessory who just provided her with what she wanted on her own terms in her own time frame. That’s bad enough.
What’s worse is that this guy has a life threatening illness, and supposedly she is the victim here? Her belief that ‘WAaaaaaaah you fucked up my plans by being severely ill.’ is somehow worse than his life being at risk …
Well, that does for bullshit what Stonehenge does for rocks.
That’s just it, right there. Yes, Kate had every right to feel upset and betrayed. It’s an upsetting event. In the first 30 minutes of her hearing about this, I can understand her acting irrationally, because she’s knee-deep in what appears to be an irrational world. 12 hours later, she might still be in that state. But weeks later? She could summon up some rationality and compassion. She had time to come back to a rational state. It was a dick move on her part.
Then again, we’re missing some information. We don’t know what she actually said, or how much compassion she did or did not say it with. SpazCat told us that she told her that “I went off on him.” That’s third-hand information to us. We weren’t there. Part of what I’m going to guess in this is that some of the anger we’re reading here is really frustration with the Navy’s beurocracy. If she’d been trying to get through to him for weeks, and the Navy has been stonewalling her, then she’d be understandably upset.
Beurocracy + suicide + a third-hand account = Something more is going on here.
Aside from Kate being ‘good people,’ nobody but the OP knows anything about her. So I find it pretty hard to understand why so many people think she’s a bitch. Because unless they were in a three-way relationship, even the OP doesn’t know what went on between Alex and Kate prior to this. No one really does, outside a two-person relationship. What drove him to join the Navy in the first place? Was it a decision she supported? Will he be treated if he stays in the Navy? Can he afford treatment if he leaves? Has she been pregnant before while in the relationship? Does her own family have a history of mental illness?
Nobody knows if and how they talked about their future, so no one can know what has changed for each of them. Or exactly what she told him on the phone. And yeah, it’s difficult to understand depression unless you’re depressed or have had an episode recently. I’d say next to impossible. And ‘tough love’ or calls to ‘snap out of it’ may be misguided, but are pretty typical reactions to depression, even attempted suicide.
Wow, great simulpost!
I’m debating whether or not to post the relevant part of the conversation so y’all can see what she said about him. I understand that she’s upset (I mentioned that in the OP). Hell, I’m angry at him. But I’ve also been depressed and I know how bad it can be. Like I told her, there comes a point where you’re all alone in the dark box of your mind and you can’t find the way out. She’s never been depressed so she doesn’t understand that.
I also don’t think it’s sunk in with her that Alex may not have a choice whether he stays in service. He may be discharged for this. He’s certainly never going to get the security clearance to do what he signed up for. The best he can hope for (this is what I’ve been told) is a desk job. And that’s if he even wants to stay in which he doesn’t. Kate’s the one who wants him to stay because “the Navy is SUPPOSED to be hard.” Last time I checked, it wasn’t supposed to be so hard you tried to kill yourself.
I personally am not blaming Kate for freaking out. I would too if a loved one attempted suicide. I’ve been wondering why he didn’t say anything to anyone before he hit rock bottom. I’d like to slap some survival instinct in him myself, but I’ve never had a friend do this before and I’m completely unsure as to what to do. I’d love to write him a letter, but what do I say?
What I’m blaming Kate for is building up an elaborate castle in the air based on her desire to get hitched and start having babies. She told me “I’m 24 years old- I wanna get married and have kids at some point in my life.” I’m 27. I had an engagement break up earlier this year but apparently that doesn’t matter because I don’t want to have babies. :rolleyes: She, however, in the last three months since Alex got out of boot camp, has built up this dream of being A Navy Wife and living down on the base. When he got out of boot camp, he said he wanted to stay with her and maybe get married later on and all of a sudden she’s going out and buying a wedding dress and an eternity band and researching the rules on marriage licenses and insisting they get married by the end of the year. Did this contribute to Alex’s problems? Most likely. Does she realize what kind of pressure she’s putting on him? Probably not. Am I caught in the middle of this? I think that’s obvious.
All I can do is try to remain friends with both of them and be a listening ear to both sides.
Put me in the group that thinks she’s a cunt. She isn’t acting like she’s cares about the dude at all, only about how it affects her own selfish plans to get her marriage hooks in this guy and have kids. The second worst thing he could do is marry this self-centered harpy. The worst thing he could do is have kids with her. She doesn’t see him as a person, just as an object to serve her agenda. She’s one of those chicks who just wants to be married to be married. Those should be avoided like the plague.
What I heard was “I don’t care how miserable or unwell you are, I forbid you to make any major changes in your life, because I require financial stability and I don’t want any interference with my spawning plans.”
Could be. I wasn’t there, either. And that’s the part, you’ll notice, that I already said I didn’t agree with - the staying in the Navy part.
Word. While I’ll fully admit it is not always the case, sometimes tough love is in order.
At 14, my good friend- the forever attention whore- downed a bunch of Tylenol or something, causing her mom to find her and call 911. After a hospital visit and a stomach pump, she was back home and everyone was focused on her. The thing that got me was that she’s smart, she knew taking a bunch of Tylenol probably wouldn’t really do anything to her, she just wanted the attention. Hell, later she admitted this.
She was 15 when her mother died of cancer, but my friend was a strong, strong girl who handled it well. After her mother’s death, she went to move in with her incredibly wealthy aunt and uncle which she actively complained about almost every day. She rebelled- she started doing coke, drinking, partying, throwing tantrums, etc. etc. All the while, she had no problem taking their money and buying jewelry, designer purses, etc. All that said, she certainly had a reason to be upset, but she knew what she was doing and was acting out for attention-- she wanted the judge that placed her with her uncle to think she was in a bad place and let her move in with other family members; she also wanted everyone to feel even worse for her because of how worse she imagined she had it (certainly anything is worse than being with your own mother, that I don’t deny).
One day, I get the call that she’s in the hospital because she slit her wrists. I go to visit and the nurse happens to be changing her bandages. I notice that she cut herself across her wrists, not down. Now let me say: this girl is smart, very smart- so smart that at 16 she was taking premed classes at the local university.
So, when the nurse left, I threw the flowers I brought in the trash and looked her in the eye, “Listen, [friend]: I know why you did this. I’m not buying that bullshit that you’re depressed- you fucking wanted attention. And, do you know what? That’s DISGUSTING. How DARE you put your friends and family through this so that you can get whatever the fuck it is you think you want. What do you think your mother feels right now?” And she started to cry. I continued, “No, seriously! What do you think your mother would think? Would she want this for you? Would she be proud of you for acting like a pissed off child? How dumb are you to hurt yourself for attention?” Then I told her that she could call me when she grew the fuck up and I walked out.
For some time after, I questioned what I had done. I realized that there was a chance she was really sick and I just did what may have been the most douchey thing ever, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was right about her motives.
A few months later, she gave me a call and thanked. She said I was the only person that told her what she needed to hear- everyone else told her it wasn’t her fault, they told her she could have whatever she wanted to feel better (they went on a $15k vacation to Hawaii, she went on countless shopping sprees, etc), and they told her she could have whatever medication she wanted to feel better. She said that if it weren’t for me coming and telling her what I did, she’d still be that person.
Now, we’re best friends and she’s happily engaged to a wonderful, happy man and is far away from her family.
Am I saying this is what is a good plan in the case of the OP’s friend? Of course not. I’m just saying that sometimes being a “cunt” is due. We don’t know all of the details of the OP and for all we know the fiancee was totally off base and wrong. That said, she isn’t automatically a flaming bitch for feeling the way she did.
Maybe. You weren’t there, and neither was I. Neither of us knows her.
But yeah, from the account given, she comes off as a selfish, clueless bitch who would be satisfied with Interchangeable Sperm Donor #13638.
More backstory is needed.