The media teaches us that sexual violence is a noisy event. It happens in a dark and empty street to a woman of culturally sanctioned beauty, by an evil man. The woman screams and fights and runs, but the man overpowers her with physical force.

The reality is much quieter. The reality is that very often a person’s body will go into freeze, not fight or flight. The target of the violence will not scream or kick or fight, they will simply shut down, their body too invested in simply surviving an unsurvivable attack – “the most violent crime you can survive,” as Thomas Tremblay describes it – to allocate any resources to calling for help.

And this metaphor of the reality of deadly distress is true for depression, too. It’s quiet. People won’t necessarily sob and despair in any obviously visible way. I would argue that, like drowning, if a person is in a state where they can sob and wail, they’re doing okay – they don’t feel GOOD, but they’re not about to die. When it gets really dangerous, they get quiet. They’re in freeze, all their resources committed to the impossible task keeping their head above water, taking one more gasping breath.