Stephen Hawking on Depression, “The Black Hole”

Real hero gone this week. Absolute idol of mine (And I know he is important to SO many of us!), in so many different ways.

Obviously his triumph with his physical health is timelessly inspiring. And not just triumphing over physical health, but then contributing the immense amount that he did to contemporary Physics on top of it.

Forgive my ignorance of the intricacies of his Science, I’m afraid I can offer less than zero insight on that…

But aside from these immense achievements, I stumbled upon something else. Turns out his brilliance even touched into the world of mental health, with something beautiful he said in a lecture in London in January 2016.

Drawing parallels between black holes and depression, Hawking said:

“The message of this lecture is black holes aren’t as black as they are painted.  They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought.

Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly to another universe. So if you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up – there’s a way out.”

The “black hole” is a phrase often thrown around in relation to depression, so I love how he has turned it in this way. Just as he smashed expectations of his own health, here he smashed the conception that there’s no way out of the black hole.

So I think, the time has come where we don’t have to be scared of the black hole. It may be dark, but there is a way out, and it will come.

For me there’s another layer to this metaphor, as just as physics daily disproves and proves and discovers and educates, medicine in mental health improves constantly. The further it advances, the ways out of our black holes will be clearer and clearer.

 

To a hero of mine, and of the world.

Stephen Hawking (1942 – 2018)

Big love

J X

P.S: Sorry one more thing people, I just found out he said a couple of years ago he wanted to play a bond villain because he thought his voice and chair would fit the part.

I genuinely could not love this man more.