In reply to this. I am a high school English teacher. While you may have been the only student to choose this particular soliloquy, it is a very famous one so it probably wouldn't have rung bells for a teacher in and of itself. While you probably picked it because it had deep meaning for you, the reality is that most students pick whatever to get the assignment done without really much deep meaning attached at all. Unless you followed up your recitation with an essay describing your depression or told the teacher something that would have made it very apparent, it was probably not that obvious. I think those of us who live with depression are sure others can pick up on it, but honestly, most of the time we are pretty good at keeping it to ourselves and people don't pick up on the clues.

Fortunately in my district we do a great deal of depression and mental illness awareness as well as suicide prevention work for the entire district starting in elementary school (all age appropriately), not just students who come for us for help. Students are more able to identify signs of problems in themselves and their friends and ask for help now which we hope will save some lives. I am interested to see what the statistics will bear out now that we've done this for a couple of years. I know they are identifying more students in need of help than they did previously; I'm interested to know if our suicide and attempt rate will improve.