quotations about depression
When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to survive. We come back to life thinner, paler, weaker ... but as survivors. Survivors who don't get pats on the back from coworkers who congratulate them on making it. Survivors who wake to more work than before because their friends and family are exhausted from helping them fight a battle they may not even understand.
JENNY LAWSON
Furiously Happy
Depression is a treatable medical illness like cancer and heart disease.
JUDITH PEACOCK
Depression
Depression presents itself as a realism regarding the rottenness of the world in general and the rottenness of your life in particular. But the realism is merely a mask for depression's actual essence, which is an overwhelming estrangement from humanity. The more persuaded you are of your unique access to the rottenness, the more afraid you become of engaging with the world; and the less you engage with the world, the more perfidiously happy-faced the rest of humanity seems for continuing to engage with it.
JONATHAN FRANZEN
How to Be Alone
Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum.
ALAN LIGHTMAN
Einstein's Dreams
As a confirmed melancholic, I can testify that the best and maybe only antidote for melancholia is action. However, like most melancholics, I suffer also from sloth.
EDWARD ABBEY
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (Vox Clamantis in Deserto)
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, "There now, hang on, you'll get over it." Sadness is more or less like a head cold -- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
BARBARA KINGSOLVER
The Bean Trees
When you're in a Slump,
you're not in for much fun.
Un-slumping yourself
is not easily done.
DR. SEUSS
Oh
Some authors have conceptualized depression as a "depletion syndrome" because of the prominence of fatigability; they postulate that the patient exhausts his available energy during the period prior to the onset of the depression and that the depressed state represents a kind of hibernation, during which the patient gradually builds up a new story of energy.
AARON T. BECK
Depression
What's a depression? The dictionary says a depression is a dent. And what's a dent? Everybody knows a dent is a hole. And what's a hole? You tell me what's a hole! And I'll tell you that a hole is nothin'!
JIMMY DURANTE
The Phantom President
Depression has been labelled the common cold of psychopathology. This comparison is unfortunate, for it conveys the impression of a frequent but mild complaint. In reality ... depression is not only the most frequent mental health problem, but is among the most serious.
PAUL GILBERT
Depression: The Evolution of Powerlessness
Depression is melancholy minus its charms.
SUSAN SONTAG
Illness as Metaphor
If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
KAY REDFIELD JAMISON
An Unquiet Mind
Sometimes, my heart hurts so much, I beat it with my fists. I try to run. But you cannot run away from this. You cannot run from it. Wherever you run, it waits for you. Even when you think you have escaped it, it is there, where you have run to. It waits for you, to ambush you. It is like those vines called lianas, those tropical creepers that grow around you and strangle you. You cut off one branch, but there is another that grows. You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.
KLAUS KINSKI
Playboy, 1985
Since the chain reaction is circular, the depression becomes progressively worse. The various symptoms--sadness, decreased physical activity, sleep disturbance--feeds back into the psychological system. Hence, as he experiences sadness, his pessimism leads him to conclude, "I shall always be sad."
AARON T. BECK
Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders
I feel I can claim depression because I've been prescribed antidepressants, but although depression is cause for antidepressants, I have no real evidence I've been prescribed antidepressants because I am depressed. In order to objectify my distress, which I am not even confident is real, not real distress, I have to see the doctor. And in order to affirm his viability the doctor has to treat me.
CYRUS CONSOLE
Romanian Notebook
Depression is one of the few psychological disorders that can be said to be fatal. Of all the consequences, suicide is, of course, the starkest consequence of the individual's feelings of hopelessness and debility.
CONSTANCE HAMMEN
Depression
Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
The Marriage Plot
Living with depression is like trying to keep your balance while you dance with a goat -- it is perfectly sane to prefer a partner with a better sense of balance.
ANDREW SOLOMON
The Noonday Demon
The way sadness works is one of the strange riddles of the world. If you are stricken with a great sadness, you may feel as if you have been set aflame, not only because of the enormous pain, but also because your sadness may spread over your life, like smoke from an enormous fire. You might find it difficult to see anything but your own sadness, the way smoke can cover a landscape so that all anyone can see is black. You may find that if someone pours water all over you, you are damp and distracted, but not cured of your sadness, the way a fire department can douse a fire but never recover what has been burnt down.
DANIEL HANDLER (as Lemony Snicket)
The Bad Beginning
Anyone who has actually been that sad can tell you that there's nothing beautiful or literary or mysterious about depression.
JASMINE WARGA
My Heart and Other Black Holes