Quotes from Sally Brampton

The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopoeia is palliative. That is, all of them are symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them you're back at square one.

Severe depression, put simply, is an overwhelming and unmanageable onslaught of every normal, human fear and difficult emotion. It is a loss of and lack of perspective and proportion.

Why do they call it a 'mental' illness? The pain isn't just in my head; it's everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken.

Why does nobody understand that these are tears without a beginning or an end? I thought sadness had a beginning and an end. And a middle. A story, if you like. I was wrong.

I use humour to hide behind, because I cannot bear to feel my feelings, cannot face the truth.

Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.

I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key.

I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.

You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard.

I know how it feels to be told that it's all in your mind. It drives you mad.

I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be a cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.

It's all very well learning why I behave in the way that I do. That doesn't stop me behaving in those ways. I am just more conscious of them.' Consciousness is where therapy stops and we begin. Therapy can only give us knowledge. It is up to us to use it.

This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong.

It did not seem to matter whether I was present or not. After a time I became resentful, feeling that the flowers mocked me, blooming in defiance of my listless misery.

It is not that science is failing us. It is simply that the solution is as complex and multifaceted as the illness itself. For every theory of its causes, there is another to contradict it; for every new treatment, there is another that dismisses it as ineffective. This is not deliberate obstruction. Depressive illness, as well as being complex, is highly individual. What works for one person does not work for another. And often there is no explanation why this is so.

The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars etc., is sure to be noticed. Søren Kierkegaard

Depression is a paralysis of hope. One thing I know is true. Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.

Therapy helped, but it is not magic. It does not change our thoughts or behaviours. It only teaches us what they might be. It does not work unless we take from it what we have learned and put it into action.

If we go on behaving in the same way, we will crash. If we pretend that those obstacles in our character don't exist, or are something else entirely, we will still crash. But if we acknowledge them and behave in a different way, we will come to a better and safer place.

In order to break the treaty, we have to learn to ask for and then, just as crucially, accept help. First, though, it is important to understand ourselves, and to discover what it is that we need. Habits set up over a lifetime may be hard to break but, certainly, it is easier once you have identified them.

I believe, completely, that life is about connection; that nothing else truly matters.

What we resist, will persist.

Normal is a piece of string. What's normal for one person is off the chart for another.

I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.