Quotes from Andrew Solomon

It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time. Diagnosis

Without self-discovery," Hahn wrote, extending an idea of Nietzsche's, "a person may still have self-confidence, but it is a self-confidence built on ignorance and it melts in the face of heavy burdens.

Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.

Therapy allows a person to make sense of the new self he has attained on medication, and to accept the loss of self that occurred during a breakdown. You need to be reborn after a severe episode, and you need to learn the behaviors that may protect against relapse. You need to run your life differently from how you ran it before.

If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services.

The parental predisposition to love prevails in the most harrowing of circumstances.

Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth. Treatments

In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.

I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I found a way to love my depression. I love it because it forced me to cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living-and that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture.

People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.

Prozac doesn't do it unless we help it along. Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.

Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet's blurred reality.

You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world's diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn't matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.

Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.

To want to kill yourself, however, requires a whole extra level of passion and a certain directed violence.

Suicide is not the result of passivity; it is the result of an action taken. It requires a great deal of energy and a strong will in addition to a belief in the permanence of the present bad moment and at least a touch of impulsivity.

If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes.

I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. I have turned, with an increasingly fine attention, to love. Love is the other way forward. They need to go together: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine.

I guess being depressed all the time was actually a relatively safe place to be. I didn't have the real-world worries that everyone else has because I knew that I simply couldn't function well enough to take care of myself. What do I do now? Trying to break the habits of years of depression is what I'm doing for the moment with my doctor.

After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, you need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. Evincing a better self, in response to things that have caused you hurt.

I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.

This book's conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.

Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.