Spike's Soul: What Does it Mean?

my mind that Buffy was mentally ill last season.) She was the one who needed help. Unless there was something wrong with Spike too, Spike should have been the strong one, the one trying to help her get better. In much the same way that, right now in Season Seven, Spike is the one who needs help and Buffy should be the strong one. The difference is that Buffy seems to be doing just that, she is doing what she can to help, and it does seem to be helping.

If Spike was trying to help Buffy get better in Season Six (and I believe that, in his own misguided way, he was trying), he did everything wrong. Virtually every time he opened his mouth, Buffy sank deeper into her depression. In "Normal Again", when Spike told Buffy to just get over her hero complex and let herself live, I was absolutely horrified that he would speak to her like that. Even if Buffy hadn’t been out of her mind and uncertain about reality at that moment, you don't tell someone who is clinically depressed to just get over it. Depression is an illness, and saying something like that -- implying that Buffy should be able to just snap out of it and that she must have some kind of moral weakness for feeling that way -- is almost guaranteed to make the despair and self-loathing worse. If Spike had been deliberately looking for a way to drive Buffy past depressed and right to suicidal, he could not have picked a better thing to say to her. I half expected Buffy to try to kill herself in the wake of Spike's words to her and, in a way, that's what did happen. His words did drive her over that edge, since Buffy's decision to dump out the antidote and leave the world of Sunnydale was a metaphorical type of suicide. Luckily for both Buffy and Spike, it was only metaphorical.

I'm not saying that Buffy's depression made the way she acted last year right or that Spike deserved to be treated that way. But it does (to me anyway) make the way Buffy acted understandable. She was sick and Spike should have been a little more sensitive to what she was going through. In the past, I had seen him be sensitive and understanding with someone who was mentally ill, but it seemed

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