Quotes About Depression

Yes," Mom said. "People may want to kill themselves. But no one wants to be depressed, or in pain, or lonely, or hurt.

Depression—feelings of being down, flat, dead; feelings of hopelessness; being tired all the time. Like sadness and anger, depression is hard to be around. You can't make it go away, however. People need to go through it, not around it.

Some consider this a paralyzing moral dilemma. I don't. For me, having lived through episodes of major depression, this is a no-brainer. If there is a pill that will make you well, or make it less likely you will get sick, you take it. If Prozac hasn't saved my life, it has profoundly changed it.

The conventional wisdom is that episodes of major depression strike women twice as frequently as men. The drug evidence is stark. A survey found women nearly three times as likely as men to take antidepressants—with usage as high as one in every four or five women. If those characterizations are right, yoga should resonate strongly with women as a way of fighting the blues.

There was no point in looking again. He [Cork] knew that. No point except to feed the coldness inside him. In a strange way, that was exactly what he wanted now. He wanted to feed himself to the cold until the cold had consumed him and he didn't care anymore.

over our house. My mother became nearly mute and more often than not the only sound from her was weeping. She kept the curtains drawn so that it felt as if permanent night had fallen. Never much concerned anyway with her mundane domestic duties she completely stopped cooking and cleaning and sat for hours in the quiet dark of the living room. She was flesh without spirit, eyes without sight. It felt as

Abraham Lincoln suffered through depression through his life and then suffered through the pain of conducting a civil war, and emerged with the sense that Providence had taken control of his life, that he was a small instrument in a transcendent task.

Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.

But these abnormal emotions feel just as valid and realistic as the genuine feelings created by undistorted thoughts, so you automatically attribute truth to them. This is why depression is such a powerful form of mental black magic.

Absolutes do not exist in this universe. If you try to force your experiences into absolute categories, you will be constantly depressed because your perceptions will not conform to reality. You will set yourself up for discrediting yourself endlessly because whatever you do will never measure up to your exaggerated expectations. The technical name for this type of perceptual error is "dichotomous thinking." You see everything as black or white—shades of gray do not exist.

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow. Or a herd of cows. The universe is not there to overwhelm us; it is our home, and our resource. The bigger the better.

Some people become depressed at the scale of the universe, because it makes them feel insignificant. Other people are relieved to feel insignificant, which is even worse. But, in any case, those are mistakes. Feeling insignificant because the universe is large has exactly the same logic as feeling inadequate for not being a cow.

The first decade of the twenty-first century was a crazy bookend to the twentieth, opening with a second Pearl Harbor and ending with a second Great Crash, with a second Vietnam wedged in between. Now we seem caught in the coils of a second Great Depression.

If depression, loneliness, and social anxiety maintain themselves through a vicious circle of negative experiences, negative thinking, and self-defeating behavior, it should be possible to break the circle at any of several points—by changing the environment, by training the person to behave more constructively, or by reversing negative thinking. And it is. Several therapy methods help free people from depression's vicious circle.

Rosen, D. (1996) Transforming Depression: Healing the Soul Through Creativity. New York: Penguin/Arkana.

The facts of the Great Depression made a dominant economic theory that denied the possibility of generalized crisis untenable.

Losing even a single night's sleep can precipitate a manic episode in people with bipolar disorder who have otherwise been stable (Malkoff-Schwartz et al. 1998). In parallel, sleep deprivation can improve the mood of a person with depression, although only briefly (Harvey, 2008).

my big depression. For six months I languished at the bottom of a deep hole, like the shaft of a waterless well, while kindly, puzzled people...peered down at me over the rim of the parapet and tried to cheer me up, or lowered drugs and advice in a bucket.

I quit smoking in December. I'm really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist's life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.

The worst forms of depression are cured when Holy Scripture is believed.

Blue. My God! I'm so blue that if I were a dog, I'd sit on my haunches and howl and howl and howl...

Pardon me for breathing, which I never do any way so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God, I'm so depressed.

I knew you could find a certain relief in begging God, it had helped me, but on the other hand, God never answered directly and that was always depressing.

People with depression have something very valuable to teach us... how to live when it doesn't ever feel good.