Quotes About Depression

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

Grief is a humble angel who leaves you with strong, clear thoughts and a sense of your own depth. Depression is a demon who leaves you appalled.

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.

I had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space through which you once metered the world, or the world, you. This is the presence of major depression.

The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.

If you stimulate seizures in an animal every day, the seizures eventually become automatic; the animal will go on having them once a day even if you withdraw the stimulation. In much the same way, the brain that has gone into depression a few times will continue to return to depression over and over. This suggests that depression, even if it is occasioned by external tragedy, ultimately changes the structure, as well as the biochemistry, of the brain.

It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.

So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.

Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals.

Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood.

To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles.

That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it.

The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. I hope that this basic fact will offer sustenance to those who suffer and will inspire patience and love in those who witness that suffering.

The only way to find out whether you're depressed is to listen to and watch yourself, to feel your feelings and then think about them. If you feel bad without reason most of the time, you're depressed. If you feel bad most of the time with reason, you're also depressed, though changing the reasons may be a better way forward than leaving circumstance alone and attacking the depression. If the depression is disabling to you, then it's major.

one loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;

Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one, it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.

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

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.

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.

Actually travel is the opposite of depression. Depression is a curling inward, and travel is an opening outward.