make it stop

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do you think it's possible to be so depressed that your body just stops functioning? just stops? couldn't your brain just subconsciously say, "okay that's enough then..." and everything just sorta... stops? this may sound like a suicidal thought, trust me, it's not. i am far too religious to ever "commit the act". but doesn't it just seem like if you completely lost the will to live, your brain could just stop controlling your breathing impulse or something? or just simply.. stop?

Theres your problem.

With all my strange ailments I sometimes thinks my body just wants to give up as if I'm subconsciously willing myself to go.

I often wish for this to happen, but I doubt that it ever would.

Actually, there was a study that showed depressed people tend to have weakened immune systems. A decreased will to live does affect your body (even if your diet/exercise habits are sufficient for good health), but on a long-term, gradual basis.

Depression in itself is known to kill, though some attribute that t have no friends to drag you to the doctor/force you to take meds when you become ill

People who believe in curses can 'just die' for no good physiological reason if they believe themselves to have been cursed.

True, but be honest and tell all of the story. A person who believes that they have been cursed will just sit back and think 'well, there's no point in eating or drinking because I'm cursed'. They then act as their own worst enemy and die fron dehydration a few days later. This doesn't happen too often in the western world but there are documented cases of it occuring in sub-Saharan Africa.

Ed Almos

As Helsinger said, depression can weaken the immune system. It obviously can affect the metabolism. It can take away your sleep. Alter how you digest food and of course, your appetite. Stomach ulcers can get bad enough to be life threatening.

I think a lot of cancers are, maybe not caused by, but aggravated by the emotional state of the individual.

There's also the way a depressed person reacts to their environment. You might be less cautious and more accident prone if you just don't care anymore. Stop signs and safety warnings don't matter as much to you if self preservation has become a lower priority.

When my dad found out that he had developed diabetes, he became an alcoholic and started eating nothing but sweet, sugary foods. He wanted to die and that was his slow form of suicide. Whether that contributed to the cancer that eventually killed him a few years later, I don't know.

I've taken risks before that I consciously hoped might result in my own death. Luckily, I'm still here and quite shocked that life is actually getting better in the way so many people told me it would... I NEVER believed them when they told me though.

Your brain will never say " ok i give up." Its counterproductive to the whole procreation of the species. It is theoreticly possible for one to go into shock and die. if someone went into psychosomatic shock ( i dont even know if it exists though, bust sounds like it could) they could seem to just die. But your brain would have to persieve a HUGE threat to get you to that stage. Plus this would be all/mostly subconscious so you probably wouldn't be aware of it.

More likely you would die due to complications brought on by prolonged stress. General Adaption Syndrome(GAS) states that the body exists at homeostasis ( a baseline norm) untill a threat is percieved. then the body goes into an alert phase when your body pumps out tons of different hormones and chemicals ( epi, norepi, corticoids, etc.). Now this goes on for a few min ( 10ish iirc)

then the body goes into resistance phase. the chem/horm. are still being put out, just in lower levels. The longer this state lasts the more damage is done ( especially to the circulatory system, chem constrict blood vessels at this time and a lot more fluids are added ( aka smaller tubes need to carry more liquid then normal). this is were you encounter weakened systems ( immune, circulatory, etc).

then the body goes into exhaustion phase. now the chem/horm being up out drop fast ( to below norm lvls) and the body basically breaks down. organs fail. If you don't get out of this you WILL eventually die.

on another note, I'm enjoying my Stress and Coping class where we just learned the dynamics of a stress response.

wow... what a fun class!

that's all really cool and interesting stuff!

where the mind goes the body follows. I have been depressed like that at one time or another. I get to the point where i cannot eat right, sleep right, or even give a crap about it. There are times you want to just die. Literally just want God to take you home, because you just dont want to live anymore. it will pass. I have the same thing about suicide, its not an option for me. I have been so depressed at one time i lost 20 pounds in a month... I pulled out of it, but i find myself getting there again at times. It can kill you, but you have to force yourself to keep living and take care of yourself too. Sometimes you just have to crawl out of the hole slowly.