Nothing snarky here.  Nothing funny.  No politics.  Just an observation on a sad story.

I’m no literary connoisseur.  My taste in fiction (though its hard for me to remember the last time I read any) runs toward horror or spy novels.  In other words, I don’t read any “deep” fiction.

But even I recognized the name of Sylvia Plath when I saw today’s New York Times headline that her son just killed himself, nearly fifty years her own suicide at age 30.

Plath’s most famous work told a story that tracked her own: a women suffering a nervous breakdown and suicide attempt.  How sad that her son, Nicholas Hughes, only a year old at the time of her suicide and shielded from the details for most of his youth, should also kill himself.

Hughes had apparently been battling depression for a long time.  I’ve never suffered from it myself, but have had to deal with it in others — though I didn’t do a very good job.  Let me just ask the usually snarky and those who discount the impact of mental illness on people, who think those suffering from depression need to “just get over it” — let me ask you all to think again.  We’re all made different, and our brains are different.  Help these people, and don’t turn your back on a family member, friend or colleague because you think he or she needs to “get over it.”