Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.

I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small...

Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.

When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.

We are not easy to help. Nor are we easy to be around. Nobody with a serious illness is easy to be around. Although not obviously physically disabled, we struggle to get things done. Our...

Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.

I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort.

Wanting to die (or ‘suicidal ideation’as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it,...

A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn’t exist.

Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with...

The terrible truth about depression, and the part of its nature that terrifies me the most, is that it appears to operate beyond reason; feelings happen to you for no apparent cause. Or rather, there...

Sometimes,” says a fellow depressive, “I wish I was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That’s how I feel anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because...

I would not wish depression on anybody. And yet, it taught me a lot. I have not become suddenly mawkishly grateful for my life but I am more interested in it, more engaged you might...

Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it.Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it...

I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.

A friend called the other day.’How are you?’ she said.The sun was shining, the sky a merciless blue. It was only eleven in the morning but I had been awake since three twenty. I was...

It is two years since I emerged from depression and I no longer want myself dead. I want myself alive. I am no longer my own enemy. Depression is the enemy. The monster lives at...

As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive’s fear.

Everyone else has a work party,’Kate said. ‘So why shouldn’t we? We’re working hard at not being mad.