This past weekend, I lost a friend to suicide.
Despondent over painful issues in his personal and family life, this man – a well-respected businessman who was loved and respected by hundreds – ended his own life.
Trey Pennington was a friend and social media collaborator, someone I had begun to know over recent years and wanted to know much better. I, and many others, will miss him deeply. The sorrow at this loss, and the angry sting of knowing that this gracious gentleman was finally overcome by depression and personal grief, has led me to take action on something I’ve put off long enough.
No-one can stop the wholesale carnage caused by depression each year. But maybe, by telling my story, I can help someone here or there who is living under dark clouds and doesn’t know what to do.
I lived under those clouds for decades. And, I’m recovering.
After Trey’s passing, I decided that, in his memory, I would finish and publish this story. I had put it on the backburner many times because, to tell the truth, although I have felt for years that I was destined to write in both short-form (blogs) and long-form (books), I was intimidated. My perfectionism – which once fed into depression like gasoline feeds flames – kept me back from writing more than a few posts.
No more. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy and try to take back some prisoners.
I have never been able to forget the wonderful foreword of J.I. Packer’s classic book, Knowing God, where he introduces the volume by saying, “As clowns yearn to play Hamlet, so I have wanted to write a book about God. This book, however, is not it….if what is written here helps anyone in the way that the meditations behind the writing helped me, the work will have been abundantly worth while.”
I feel like a clown among giants when I see the works of real authors. Nonetheless, my story may give understanding to a loved one, or help someone in darkness to face reality and get some help. If so, the work of writing – and the pain of living with depression for so many years – will have been “abundantly worthwhile.”
This is a quick read – maybe 15 minutes. And it has a particular focus on men, who often live in denial about things like depression. It is definitely not a literary masterpiece – it’s primarily a call to action.
The book is free to download and the file may be distributed freely:
Click to download –> Clearing Clouds
We can’t bring Trey back. But maybe we can pull some others back from the brink.
>> If you want to take a look at signs and symptoms of depression in a quick-read format, WebMD has the following helpful links:
Men and Depression (on the topic of men, this is also quite helpful, from the Mayo Clinic)
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Six million American men will be diagnosed with depression this year. But millions more suffer silently, unaware that their problem has a name or unwilling to seek treatment. In a confessional culture in which Americans are increasingly obsessed with their health, it may seem clichéd—men are from Mars, women from Venus, and all that—to say that men tend not to take care of themselves and are reluctant to own up to mental illness. But the facts suggest that, well, men tend not to take care of themselves and are reluctant to own up to mental illness. Although depression is emotionally crippling and has numerous medical implications—some of them deadly—many men fail to recognize the symptoms. Instead of talking about their feelings, men may mask them with alcohol, drug abuse, gambling, anger or by becoming workaholics. And even when they do realize they have a problem, men often view asking for help as an admission of weakness, a betrayal of their male identities.
