Things have been written on this topic that have bothered me, and there's something I'd like to say, particularly about the ratio of social threads to support.

Who are any of us to say that the social threads have no value, that they are unrelated to either support or depression?

For those who don't know the recent history of asd, or for those who may be forgetting it.... Let me start by mentioning someone who is very special to many of us here. Her name is M. She cuts. She has attempted suicide. She also has the mother of all mothers, so to speak--cold, vindictive, controlling. M.'s mother knows about the cutting and the suicide attempts. Her response to M. this summer was a threat: do either of those again, and you can't go back to college. But college is M.'s primary escape from this environment. So M. has been stuck this summer, not quite in the manner of house arrest, but in a miserable situation with virtually no release. ASD has been her lifeline--not just to talk about meds, or coping with specific issues of depression, but to let out her pain, and to be her primary contact with people who truly understand how she feels. There really hasn't been anything that she could do about this, or that any of us could help her with, except to commiserate with her, and to distract her when we could. A good part of that has been purely socialization, because we were a part of her link to sanity. This is what some have called cliques. It was support--because it was what M. needed in order to get through a summer that she could do nothing to change or to avoid.

We had a huge string of crashes and suicide attempts through June and July. I was one of those who crashed, twice. It was an extremely painful period for all of us, including those few who managed get through this period unscathed. The social and humor threads were a lifeline then, for me and for others, because the pain was too much to deal with. Those threads were links between people who knew and understood what was going on, and it was wonderful simply to maintain human contact, even if we couldn't talk about the pain.

What I like about ASD today is that it is a whole community. I know the people here, not as pleas for help, but as whole people. When it comes to the point that one of us needs support, and when I'm in a place where I have something to give, I can give better support because I know more about that person who is in pain. If you have any doubt about this, then please, think about my response to E. He and I had talked before, by email, so it wasn't one of those visible social threads, but it was still largely social. Because I knew E.--at least a little--I knew things that weren't present in his post: his age, a little more about his family situation, what kind of person he is, what kind of things he is able to understand and deal with. I also knew what he knew about me, since I knew what parts of my web pages that he'd read. I was able to bring that whole aspect of his knowledge of me into the picture with a single reference to the coldness of my own mother. I could tie my experience to his, and talk to E. as a friend, because we already knew something about each other.

To me, this is the whole picture of support. ASD is not just a question-and-answer forum. It is a support network, where people know each other, and care about each other, and can put that knowledge and caring to use when someone is down and hurting. The knowing and caring are part of the support in another crucial way, because there are people here whom I will reach out to no matter what condition I am in--because I have to; these people are friends, and I cannot let them suffer alone.

Many of us have these links, and these links do not form a closed circle. This is an open and continuously changing network of those connections, with new people coming in all the time. All that is necessary to join this network is to reach out, to be human, to express your needs and your feelings.

Yes, ASD has changed, even during the few months that I've been here. It changes as the people change, as people come and go. The change is not good or bad, it just happens. It will continue to happen, because there is no way to stop the changes.

But one thing that I do not want to see is an ASD that is limited to questions and answers. Depression is about the way we live; for many of us, it even colors the good times in ways that normal people will never understand. It affects all parts of our lives, from work to relationships to those times when we face ourselves alone in abject terror. Because we are all whole people, we need support as whole people, and I want ASD to be the kind of place where whole people can get support for everything that is touched by depression. As all of us know, that means everything in our lives.