[…] I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the...

Depression affects almost 80% of migraine sufferers at one time or another. People with migraine, especially chronic migraine, also are more likely to experience intense anxiety and to have suicidal tendencies. If we want to...

Sometimes giving up feels like the easiest thing to do. But then the easiest thing has never produced more than a garden full of weeds.

Not wanting the girls to endure the shame of a crazy mother, I spent my days acting as normal as possible. I walked through life, an actor in a Leave it to Beaver episode, determined...

I think I might be bi-polar. It’s not normal to be this emotionally unstable.

Man disavows, and Deity disowns me;Hell might afford my miseries a shelter;Therefore Hell keeps her ever-hungry mouths allBolted against me.Hard lot! encompassed with a thousand dangers,Weary, faint, trembling with a thousand terrors,I’m called, if vanquished,...

It was clear to her now, Happiness was a seductive illusion. No one as fucked up as her deserved one drop of joy. But oh god was it delicious when it fell into her lap...

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.

We have shown that a gene (or protein) called p11 is involved in the multiple complex changes that underlie depression.

Some comfort it would have been, could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself tempted and tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, as I imagine, without Life, though only Diabolic Life, were more frightful:...

When you feel life is tough.. take a trip around a nearby hospital and all your worries will start looking smaller.

And the boys were all clean, their faces freshly and brutally shaved, their hair painstakingly gelled into exquisite apparent carelessness, with this electric feeling inside of them, which matched the feelings in the girls, that...

Call it not patience, Gaunt; it is despair:

If I were you I’d put that away. See you’re just wasted and thinking about the past again, darling you’ll be okay.

Strolling on the plateau of life, desperate for the mountain, I never thought that I would get this far. It’s only art that has carried me through, given me faith in my own existence. But...

When your heart is broken, it’s easier to follow rules

But what were you supposed to do with that weight? Once it was on you? Just be a man? Just suck it up? Maybe you were. Maybe that was the real test. Maybe that is...

When the black thing was at its worst, when the illicit cocktails and the ten-mile runs stopped working, I would feel numb as if dead to the world. I moved unconsciously, with heavy limbs, like...

In our circle, stress was a valuable status marker: I stress, therefore I am.

I chose fat and functional over slender and miserable.

Hard work does not go unnoticed,and someday the rewards will follow

Why not risk your life, if you don’t want to live anyway? Why not risk your life if you’ll never be happy no matter what you do?

It’s disappointing to feel sad for no reason. Sadness can be almost pleasantly indulgent when you have a way to justify it.

An event of great agony is bearable only in the belief that it will bring about a better world. When it does not, as in the aftermath of another vast calamity in 1914-18, disillusion is...

I hate going back. I’d rather live at the bottom of my river of black, dragged this way and that by the forces that be, than go back there. Those forty-eight hours took twenty years...

I didn’t want to fall in love. Looking at you gave me chills and kissing you made my knees weak. You made flowers grow and fill the space in my lungs which made it impossible...

The problem with growing up fearing and expecting rejection is that you cannot enter into adult relationship in the expectation of happiness.

He felt full of a dense and sour substance that was blocking his chest, and it wasn’t grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze, not even...

But day after day of depression, the kind that doesn’t seem to merit carting me off to a hospital but allows me to sit here on this stoop in summer camp as if I were...

John says I musn’t lose my strength, and has me take cod liver oil and lots of tonics and things, to say nothing of ale and wine and rare meat.Dear John! He loves me very...

What’s the difference between depression and South America?If you really had to, you could conquer South America.

Disappointment and Depression are terrorists that kidnap people’s original peace for no good reason. The Holy Spirit of God is a dependable army to drive them away! May you be free from being disappointed and...

I bought a house in a depressed neighborhood. The prices weren’t low, but the people were all bummed out.

A tramp, therefore, is a celibate from the moment when he takes to the road. He is absolutely without hope of getting a wife, a mistress, or any kind of woman except — very rarely,...

I am a sick man – oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few...

I bet if you cut open my stomach, the black slug of depression would slide out.

What people don’t understand when you’ve already been a suicide and pulled through is that after the sadness comes fear: Where is my mind going with this? I don’t want to die. I do not...

Luck always seems like it belongs to someone else.

look, tiny – i’m trying to be on my best behavior, but you have to understand – i’m always standing on the edge of something bad. and sometimes someone like you can make me look...

Don’t let the anger control you turning you into someone whom you are not.

There exist no new mistakes anywhere. The same mistakes people committed are the same mistakes people are committing and the same mistakes shall people commit

I almost said, you’re not broken, you’re just going through something. But I couldn’t. She knew. There was something terribly wrong with her, all the way inside. She was like a big diamond with a...

Eventually sinking into despair, [Heinrich von Kleist] shot himself in 1811 as part of a suicide pact made with a woman suffering from incurable cancer.

Because . . . most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and...

A dog’s spirit dies hard.

Just as a stressful life can make you depressed, continuing exposure to stressors maintains depression.

Casy said, “Ol’ Tom’s house can’t be more’n a mile from here. Ain’t she over that third rise?”Sure,” said Joad. “Less somebody stole it, like Pa stole it.”Your pa stole it?”Sure, got it a mile...

It’s not a mental complaint-it’s a physical thing, like it’s physically hard to open your mouth and make the words come out. … you stumble on them as they gather behind your lower lip. So...

. . . crazy world or maybe it’s just the view we have of it, looking through a crack in the door, never being able to see the whole room, the whole picture.

Other flowers came at the end of the summer, but by then the winter sadness had already dissipated, and the effect of the blooms was not the same.