In times like these I always cheered myself up with a certain story. I forgot just when I first heard it, or who I heard it from… but, back when I was young it would...

Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery...

We all know pain doesn’t exist without some coexisting depression.

My mother smiled. “I knew my baby wasn’t like that.”I looked at her. “Like what?””Like those awful people. Those awful dead people at that hospital.” She paused. “I knew you’d decide to be all right...

Nothing is permanent in my mysterious world, even my moments of belief – Jenifer

The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking...

Depression, is like trying to find a light switch in pitch darkness. Defeating it takes much assistance and resource. First, it’s letting in loved ones that are reaching out, when light will begin to shine.

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with...

Inside my house, nobody was home, except everybody, but it was easy to feel like those were one and the same.

I want to sleep in the ovenbecause I just burn in the bed.

I would die for you. You know that. I would die without you. If it were not for you, I would be dead a hundred times over these past five years.

When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill. It was good to be...

Depression is not madness, it’s just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you’re depressed, you think you’re the only one to have ever tasted this...

First I was decayed, I was putrefied. Kept thinking I could never live on, now that I had died…

If they’d been dogs, they would have all been in the yard eating grass and trying to yak up whatever was making them feel so lousy. Not a bone gnawed, not a ball chased-all tails...

James had taken his own life, but the need to do so was not something easily explained. He had the life he wanted: money, a home, a job, a wife, a good friend. I’d known...

How would Elijah ever understand a life that is dark more than light? Or a shadow of someone who follows her around, and when she least expects it, taps her on the back and asks,...

If she could have died…if she could have disappeared forever…but the solid surface of things refused to dissolve around her, and her body, her hateful hermaphrodite’s body, continued in its stubborn, lumpen way, to live…

You wake up one morning and all your spiritual feelings are gone. You pray, but nothing happens. You rebuke the devil, but it doesn’t change anything. You go through spiritual exercises…you have your friends pray...

Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.

This is the hour I hide everythingBehind my eyesTo see if you can seeAll the trouble my brain’s been brewing. Yes, I feel I am the worst and you are the bestAnd yet, and yet,...

When I’m feeling down, I make myself a big bowl of Up Soup. The bowl only looks empty, but in reality it’s full of hope. Grab a spoon, there’s plenty for both of us.

Sounds of depression remembering rejection Hope turns to despair black roses everywhereKeep hearing echoes voices in my mind repeating endless lies evil in disguise

Nothing is quite as depressing as depression.

Guidance counselors always love to say, ‘Just think positively,’ but that’s impossible when you have this thing inside of you, strangling every ounce of happiness you can muster. My body is an efficient happy-though-killing machine.

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual’s pain gained meaning was through its communication to others.

I didn’t have that kind of friendship, the forever kind of friendship that will last your whole life through, no matter what.

…she felt depressed beyond any thing she had ever known before.

It’s difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn’t enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I...

…we should all fortify ourselves against the dark hours of depression by cultivating a deep distrust of the certainties of despair. Despair is relentless in the certainties of its pessimism. But we have seen again...

When the expected occurred, never panic, by keep calming, you gain control over the situation.

If I was lonely, if I was afraid of being alone, then why abandon myself? Why run to someone else looking to give myself the thing that only I could give? I wanted to escape...

And another way of explaining it is to say that shit happens, and there’s no space too small, too dark and airless and fucking hopeless, for people to crawl into.

I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.

As she lay awake, she reminded herself that she was beating the depression; she was winning her life back. She had survived, and now she was going to be better than ever before.

Often he had the impression that the person answering questions from the scratchy armchair was a dummy he was controlling, that this had been true throughout his life, and that his life had become so...

This was all an excuse, I think. I was doing fine. I had a 93 average and I was holding my head above water. I had good friends and a loving family. And because I...

The guns reminded me that this was just an attempt to punch holes in the darkness that enveloped us now.

Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own. This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her...

I’ve grown up defined by this desperate, undeniable, ‘can’t breathe’ kind of space inside of myself and I’m afraid that the diagnosis is fatal.

That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest… trapping us both in a stainless cage.

It doesn’t get better,” I said. “The pain. The wounds scab over and you don’t always feel like a knife is slashing through you. But when you least expect it, the pain flashes to remind...

It was really hard to stay positive. And that’s normally a talent of mine.

People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It’s hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and...

I have sometimes thought that I have been burdened with a pack of ten misfortunes, any one of which if borne by my neighbor would be enough to make a murderer out of him.

I did the only thing I knew how to do: I built my own walls of silence to disguise my desperation and what later came to be recognized and diagnosed as depression.

Discouragement is like a scorpion in your shoe; it takes courage to toss it out so you can move on.

We are taught to believe that the ‘alienation’ that we experience sometimes, when we withdraw from everything or feel alone, is a craving for something sexual, material, or in the physical – and can be...

You don’t seem mad at all,’ she said.But I am, although I’m undergoing a cure, because my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. However, while I hope that the chemical gets rid of...

LADY LAZARUSI have done it again.One year in every tenI manage it–A sort of walking miracle, my skinBright as a Nazi lampshade,My right footA paperweight,My face a featureless, fineJew linen.Peel off the napkinO my enemy.Do...