Words are like weapons, they wound sometimes

"Sticks and stones may break your bones but names will never hurt you."

Not so.

Time after time we see this, people who suffer, and seeing no other way to end their suffering, end their lives.  Charlotte Dawson is the recent high profile case, and there will be likely be many that go unreported in Aotearoa NZ this week alone.

And so often it comes back to the sometimes thoughtless, oft-times callous, many times deliberate ways in which we wound each other with words.

For those who have not had the experience of a mental illness which magnifies the slights of others inside your head until they echo around and around with no way out, well it is a hard thing to understand I suppose.

But please be assured that the little mean cutting things we sometimes say to each other can contribute to serious blood loss, in the mental health sense, for some.

In all the sharing around Dawson's death, this is the best link I've seen - genuinely useful both for those with depression and those around them.  Despite having depression for over a decade myself I never made the clutter connection until reading it yesterday.

Let's be a little kinder to each other, or at least try.