If I had to define a major depression in a single sentence, I would describe it as a “genetic/neurochemical disorder requiring a strong environmental trigger whose characteristic manifestation is an inability to appreciate sunsets.

The day had begun to feel tinny: a pretend day, a dream day, that for some unaccountable reason she had to go on and on with as if it were real.

Emergencies have always been necessary to progress. It was darkness which produced the lamp. It was fog that produced the compass. It was hunger that drove us to exploration. And it took a depression to...

See, it’s not that I’m jealous of others. I just don’t understand why they can be happy and I can’t.

because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.

This book is dedicated to all who have been affected by sexual violence.

One thing is certain, whatever choices we make: we will not miss out on some critical purgation by seeking treatment for depression or any other form of physical suffering. If we are ripe for what...

i find nothing more depressing than optimism.

Sometimes suffering is just suffering. It will not make you strong.

if you want to achieve something, if you want to write a book, paint a picture, be sure that the center of your existence if somewhere else and that it’s solidly grounded; only then will...

Dissimulation, secretiveness, appear a necessity to the melancholic. He has complex, often veiled relations with others. These feelings of superiority, of inadequacy, of baffled feeling, of not being able to get what one wants, or...

He wondered how sick in heart a woman needed to be for her to forsake a delight in flowers.

Just start somewhere,” Dr. Marshall had said to me as I ground a banana-pineapple one to bits between my teeth. “It doesn’t have to be at the beginning.” She’d pulled her legs up, Indian-style, letting...

The insane pursuit of the holy grail of a balanced budget in the end is going to drive the economy into a depression.

When I was lost in the fog, it was as though nothing else existed. And, afterwards, it seemed incomprehensible that I had ever really thought like that. Self-recrimination inevitably followed.

Those who nurse secrets, nurse a chaotic world of amplified silence.

You know that feeling of relief as soon as you wake up from a bad dream? That is what I feel as soon as I fall asleep.

Anna Petrovna: Do you know what, Kolya? Try and sing, laugh, get angry, as you once did… You stay in, we’ll laugh and drink fruit liqueur and we’ll drive away your depression in a flash....

Well, I sure hope you get off it sometime soon,” they say.

I’m falling apart, one part after another. Falling down on the world like snow. Half of me is already on the ground, watching from below.

Feeling sorry for myself was an art.

You can talk about depression as a “chemical imbalance” all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist – a “demon,” a “beast,” or a “black dog,” as Samuel Johnson called it. It...

The doctor’s words made me understand what happened to me was a dark, evil, and shameful secret, and by association I too was dark, evil, and shameful. While it may not have been their intention,...

Even if it were possible to cast my horoscope in this one life, and to make an accurate prediction about my future, it would not be possible to ‘show’ it to me because as soon...

But here I’d like to add to what the Tempter’s Manual suggests. Depression, at its finest, is not a Future that they cannot hopefully construct, nor a shamed Past that hounds them, but an agonizing...

From the end of the World War twenty-one years ago, this country, like many others, went through a phase of having large groups of people carried away by some emotion–some alluring, attractive, even speciously inspiring,...

In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead

It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s that cold absence of feeling— that really...

Change the way you think and you will change the way you feel.

The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went...

I like games, board games, mind games and games of life. Just don’t play games with my heart because you won’t like the way I brake the rules.

In the morning you were never violently sorry– you made no resolutions, but if you had overdone it and your heart was slightly out of order, you went on the wagon for a few days...

No reason to feel depressed about being depressed. A depression can be a golden opportunity to collect the pieces and build ourselves anew. Global Souls are always on the move, nomads at heart, connected to...

One thing is undeniably clear. We have all had bad experiences, we have all had tragedies in our lives which help to shape who we are.

Some days I am the flower beneath the machine. And the machine rolls slowly on, blocking the sun, without a care for what it tramples beneath.

I’ll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.

Some people flip condos and make millions. Your boyfriend couldn’t even flip burgers and make minimum wage.

It was Chelsea who captures our plummet before it reaches the deepest parts of our vulnerability.

In 1965, a psychologist named Martin Seligman started shocking dogs.He was trying to expand on the research of Pavlov–the guy who could make dogs salivate when they heard a bell ring. Seligman wanted to head...

It/ll be better tomorrow…

When you’re in the middle of your depression, pay good attention to it, because, tended carefully, you never know where it might lead you.

Everyone comes with baggage, make sure you get one that comes with a rack

As far as he could discover, there were no signs of spring. The decay that covered the surface of the mottled ground was not the kind in which life generates. Last year, he remembered, May...

Diversion is the absolute worst remedy for depression. When we ignore the things that haunt us or taunt us, not only do they keep coming back, but they’re bigger and stronger each time they return....

I just wanna have fun and breathe, but I can’t do either one of them when I suffocate myself with depression.

It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare, you’re so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.””And what is that nightmare, Craig?””Life.

I rummaged through the drawers in search of a strong poison. I thought of nothing as I looked; I had to get it over with as quickly as possible. It was as if it were...

But if I didn’t know Kate, then maybe I didn’t know myself-and if was that not-knowing that made my gut clench. Like losing your balance, that whoosh of almost falling, before pulling yourself back in...

For six days I didn’t get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their...

I tried to push my body through his and completely disappear.