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Well, I personally believe that we should educate people on the real consequences and ways to overcome depression. When you die, that's it, there are no second chances, and everything is lost. However, if someone feels that things are so terrible that they don't want to live anymore, it is their life, and it would be selfish to tell them to continue suffering so that someone else doesn't have to feel the pain of loosing them. I have struggled with depression in the past, so I know what its like, and I found the real cure for me was truly finding and loving myself, and making myself feel important to myself.
Loving yourself sounds easy, and for some people it may be, but it took me a long time to accept myself for who I am and be happy with myself, I think that is the real key to valuing your own life. The hard part was finding that on my own, because no one can really help you do it, and I believe it requires a higher intellect to even have a chance at understanding what it means to love yourself. To start, I had to find independent qualities within myself that make me feel good about who I am, and after I found those qualities I defined myself by them. Once I knew who I was, and became happy with who I was, I found an independent source of happiness within myself that could not be extinguished by environmental factors. I no longer relied on the approval (and/or acceptance) of my piers, I no longer felt the overwhelming desire for companionship and the pain of being alone, I became my own support system and established a close relationship with myself. This may sound a little confusing because it is really hard to explain accurately, but I saw myself from "third person" point of view as well as first person. I cared about myself in the same way you would care about others close to you (if that makes sense at all). It helped me to feel not so alone. All of this may sound ridiculous or naïve, but it worked for me. Anyways, I believe trying to get people to that point would help a lot, or who knows, maybe I'm just crazy and talking out of my ass. A simpler thought would be "You only get one life so if you have nothing to lose, why not just roll the dice?, you can always die later". Anyways, that's my thoughts on the subject, and I hope it helped.
Those are some good thoughts. Learning to accept and appreciate who you are can be extremely valuable when fighting depression. It creates a sort of internal foundation that will allow you to cope with all of the external conflict.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
