Vicki Van Meter and Depression

Vicki Van Meter has died at the age of 26 due to a self inflicted gun shot wound. Vicki Van Meter was only 11 years old when she first made headlines for being the youngest girl to ever fly an airplane across country, a record later broken. Meter's family has stated that she has been battling with depression but thought that she had learned to cope with it, as reported by the Los Angeles Times.

Depression can be hard on a person and everyone around them. People who suffer from depression will often feel like they are a burden to others and may even not show it as severely as others. I have suffered with depression and was diagnosed at the young age of twelve. I come from a long family history of people who suffer from depression and bi-polar disorder.

Even though I have probably been through more things than anyone who is twice my age, depression is what I like to sometimes call a torture by silence. I can seem fine to all of my family and friends but on the inside, I am screaming out in pain. I have heard it all before and the one thing that I will never forget was when someone told me that I could fight through my depression and could live a normal life.

A normal life was all that I had wanted but it was not what I had gotten. Medication was the first thing that the doctors said I needed. Medication.... I didn't want to live my life full of medication all the time so I stopped taking it much like Vicki Van Meter had been reported as doing. Meter's brother said that she had opposed taking medication. I opposed taking medication too until I found myself alone downing a hand full of pills. Pills were always my number one choice for committing suicide. Why pills? I thought that if I could just fall asleep and not wake up then everything would be fine. I was wrong and no one should ever do this. My body felt like it was on fire and I lay in my own sweat waiting to fall fast asleep but this didn't happen.

My husband later found me but didn't understand what was wrong with me. He knew that I had suffered from depression but never knew how serious that it was until the next day.