Growing up, I'd always had to deal with an "I'm not an alcoholic" mother. In addition to this, she suffered from severe depression and anxiety issues due to some chemical imbalances in her brain. This kind of thing is somewhat tricky to deal with, as most of the options are out the window and things get limited to the more "hardcore" anti-depressant options. This scared the hell out of my mother, so naturally she never went for it.
Fast forward a bunch of years and I'm 14 years old. Puberty's happening, I'm freaking out about everything and not really sure where my life is even going at this point. My parents' relationship has already started to suffer, and at this point I'm somewhat used to the onslaught of verbal and physical abuse that happens every Friday when my dad goes out to the bars to see his friends.
Mostly, I was alright with this. I would hide away in my room and play videogames, watch movies, or anything I could to pass the time. Eventually, I started to notice my mom seem to be less and less happy, but not in the usual ways. She didn't really seem to care about a lot, and hardly reacted when I got a crummy mark in school. My dad has no idea what's going on with her and I end up playing therapist for a 60 year old man (not that fun, 2/10 would not recommend).
Life like this goes on for around a month, and then we reach a Friday where my mother ran out of wine (her drink of choice) and moved on to vodka. This was bizarre to me, as she never really drank hard liquor so worrying ensued. Lo and behold, later that night I hear a loud thud come from my parents' bedroom, and find my mother passed out on the ground with a bottle of open pills. I'd read enough stories on the internet at this point and began to assume the worst. I immediately called my dad, freaking out, and told him to get home as fast as he could as I explained the situation.
By the time he got home, I had managed to get her into her bed where she had begin to stirr again, and I got the information out of her that she hadn't taken any pills. My dad got home and told me to go to the living room and watch TV while he sorted things out.
Twenty minutes later my mother storms into the kitchen, as I follow her, and proceeds to grab the largest knife out of the knife block and put it against her neck screaming that she'll do it. At this point, I'm a 14 year old trying to talk a 50-something old woman down from killing herself, while being called many expletives and hearing the phrase "useless waste of space and time" repeated, directed at me.
Thankfully, my father ended up coming out eventually to the noise and defused the situation. Police were called, and she was taken in to hospital where she received some mediocre treatment. Years later now and she's on the "hardcore" drugs that she was scared of, and can't drink due to them anymore so everything's kind of worked out.
If anything, the whole thing was an eye opener on what life's actually like. When you see the two people in your life that you take to be super-heroes turn into people you can't even recognize, it wakes you up fast.