A TEN YEAR OLD WANTED TO DIE

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One day a ten year old child walked into my office asking if he could speak to me.

I said that any child is always welcome in my office if they need me.

The child said “Sir I do not want to live anymore!!”

I could see in his eyes that somewhere there was something very wrong as it was the saddest eyes that I had ever seen.

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I realised that it was depression; I spoke to him for a long time. In this process, I realised that this was not working. This child needed to see a Psychologist immediately.  

Some people have pain or an illness that can be fixed by a medical doctor, but some need more than this like this child needed a Psychologist.

There is a big difference between illness and depression. 

These are some signs of depression

  1.Feeling tired all the time

  2.Crying for no reason

  3.  Sleeping very badly

  4. When nothing seems positive in life all is negative

  5. Some people overeat others stop eating

  6. Death is one of the things they keep thinking about

  7. Drop in percentages in school marks like a kid who did well suddenly get very low marks

  8. Some people feel they have no goals and that make them feel worthless

  9. Not making any friends as they do not know how. 

I realised that this boy showed a lot of these signs and it was very important to get him to a psychologist as soon as possible.

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I was just thankful that he had the guts to come to me, if he had not I do not know what would have happened to him.

So I knew that because the psychologist knew how to work with the mind of the child, as we had an excellent school psychologist and I phoned him.

The next morning the psychologist was in my office to see this child.

He worked with the child for more than six months. 

Anyone who has ever been depressed will know that you feel as you are stuck in a big dark hole, and there is just no way out. 

That is the reason you need someone to get the brain working in the right direction.  

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Talking does not help, as the reason for the depression must be addressed, so that the person can get out of the hole to see life differently, and start changing his life.

Grief is not depression. Some people can think it is but it is a natural way of following a basic pattern when someone you love has died.

There are many similar things as in depression, but it must not be mistaken for depression.

Sometimes it takes a long time to recover from a person’s death. 

A person’s personality plays a very big role in this. Some people have the ability to handle it, as there are certain stages you go through to accept death of a loved one. It is a natural process in life. 

After 3 months our psychologist made a breakthrough. 

He phoned and said this is an only child, he is  in so much fear that his father may die in a mining accident, and if his mother dies as well what will happen to him.

He did not have any family or grandparent, and this was the reason that he thought if he died first, it would make life so much easier.

I went to his parent’s and explained all this to them, the mother sat there crying, she was so sorry for her son. She now understood why he was so depressed, as in mining communities death of a farther was not a rarity in the mine.

She then went to her church and spoke to her minister about this problem.

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He told her to make friends with someone who would take the child, and the child would be happy.  As there were many families who would take children in at any time.

They then started making friends with the family of the one child that they knew he liked and visited very often.

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They then explained to him that this family would take him any time and loved him just as much as they did. 

He was pleased and said "that means that if something happen I have somewhere to go."

His parents said yes and just remember it does not mean that something will happen to us, as long as we are good people and live a life the way we should, you can be an old man by the time we die.

Who would have thought that something like this could go through a 10 year olds mind?  

Fortunately he came to me when he did and which made this a very happy ending.

Hope you enjoyed my post and have a wonderful day, from the Wild Coast.