Quotes About Depression

Anxiety and depression also have a shared basis in a feeling of a lack of self-esteem or self-efficacy. (Feeling like you have no control over your life is a common route to both anxiety and depression.) Moreover, reams of studies show that stress—ranging from job worries to divorce to bereavement to combat trauma—is a huge contributor to rates of both anxiety disorders and depression, as well as to hypertension, diabetes, and other medical conditions.

fact—I say this from experience—that being severely anxious is depressing. Anxiety can impede your relationships, impair your performance, constrict your life, and limit your possibilities.

The very best meditators seem even to be able to suppress their startle response, a rudimentary physiological reaction to loud noises or other sudden stimuli that is mediated through the amygdala. (The strength of one's startle response—whether measured in infancy or adulthood—has been shown to be highly correlated with the propensity to develop anxiety disorders and depression.)

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Ps. 43:5 NIV)

Father, I pray both for those needing a lift from "the pit" and for the lifters, for those needing help and for the helpers. We're all in need of what you alone can give.

I was clinically depressed. I was paranoid. I was agoraphobic. I would have days at a time of not being able to even bathe or brush my teeth.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

The sky was falling down on me and I spent most of the time drunk. It was the only way I could handle it.

When I'm depressed, I definitely comfort eat, but I also eat when I'm happy. The only time I don't eat is if I am terribly nervous.

When was the last time someone told you 'Look at the bright side of things' when you were depressed, and you actually paid attention to them? Maybe some people do, but I sure as hell don't.

Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man he has struck bottom... there is no lower deep for him.

Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

It's the feeling that one is a cog in a machine that doesn't care. Burnout makes people angry, depressed, and unable to do or enjoy doing the work of patient care. Burnout is loneliness, isolation, and an invitation to addiction, alcoholism, and other forms of self-harm.

For some, especially young people, irritability is a more prominent experience than sadness in depression.

depression forges a connection in the brain between sad mood and negative thoughts, so that even normal sadness can reawaken major negative thoughts.

What if, like virtually everybody else who suffers repeatedly from depression, you have become a victim of your own very sensible, even heroic, efforts to free yourself—like someone pulled even deeper into quicksand by the struggling intended to get you out?

Despite some initial skepticism about what our colleagues and patients might say if we suggested we were considering meditation as a preventive approach to depression, we decided to take a closer look. We soon discovered that the combination of Western cognitive science and Eastern practices was just what is needed to break the cycle of recurrent depression, in which we tend to go over and over what went wrong or how things are not the way we want them to be.

Depression is such a cruel punishment. There are no fevers, no rashes, no blood tests to send people scurrying in concern, just the slow erosion of self, as insidious as cancer. And like cancer, it is essentially a solitary experience; a room in hell with only your name on the door

When you're depressed, everyone has an opinion about what you should do. People seem to think that not only are you depressed, you are also stupid.

My depression points to my not knowing how to lose - I have perhaps been unable to find a valid compensation for the loss. It follows that any loss entails the loss of my being - and of Being itself. The depressed person is a radical, sullen atheist.

In the psychological literature, depression is often seen as a defense against sadness. But I'll take sadness any day. There is no contest. Sadness carries identification. You know where it's been and you know where it's headed. Depression carries no papers. It enters your country unannounced and uninvited. Its origins are unknown, but its destination always dead-ends in you.

Suffer from depression. That's right. It is suffering. A person does not just have depression. She suffers from it.

Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness.

When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it's called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it's called a depression.