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selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs),
depression cannot be wiped out so long as we are creatures conscious of our own selves.
The present tense of mild depression envisages no alleviation because it feels like knowledge.
It is this acute awareness of transience and limitation that constitutes mild depression.
but this is a way of imposing a measurement on the immeasurable.
I had moods that I knew were not my moods:
But it had taken from me the energy I would have needed to kill myself, and it would not kill me.
it had become an alternative support to what it had destroyed.
The vine is what is born. The death is one’s own decay, the cracking of the branches that support this misery.
Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.
depressed. If you feel bad most of the time with reason, you’re also depressed, though changing the reasons may be a better way forward than leaving circumstance alone and attacking the depression.
Treatment does not alleviate a disruption of identity, bringing you back to some kind of normality; it readjusts a multifarious identity, changing in some small degree who you are.
Depression interacts with personality.
Can personality be altered ?
certain advantages.
Isnt it to dangerous tp suggest? Most depressed patients fail to identity that they need help
Depression frequently destroys the power of mind over mood.
Everyone has on occasion felt disproportionate emotion over a small matter or has felt emotions whose origin is obscure or that may have no origin at all.
can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand toward the floor.
People are constantly examining their own minds and rejecting their own moods. “It’s the Lourdes phenomenon,” says William Potter,
monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) or tricyclics.
In the first place, it’s dark. You are falling away from the sunlight towards a place where the shadows are black. Inside it, you cannot see, and the dangers are everywhere (it’s neither soft-bottomed nor soft-sided, the abyss). While you are falling, you don’t know how deep you can go, or whether you can in any way stop yourself. You hit invisible things over and over again until you are shredded, and yet your environment is too unstable for you to catch onto anything.
Depression relies heavily on a paralyzing sense of imminence.
Oh, some of the abyss imagery fits: the darkness, the uncertainty, the loss of control.
depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all.
The Merchant of Venice complained: It wearies me, you say it wearies you; But how I caught it, found it, or came by it What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born I am to learn;
No one can do anything but beg for help (if he can do even that) at the lowest depths of a major depression, but once the help is provided, it must also be accepted. We would all like Prozac to do it for us, but in my experience, Prozac doesn’t do it unless we help it along.
I need help and i need to accept help too
but the surest way out of depression is to dislike it and not to let yourself grow accustomed to
am swallowing my own funeral twice a day,
We must practise the business of love, and we must teach it too. We
We must hold out against violence, and perhaps against its representations.
when they have learned forgetfulness well,
“And then when they have mastered work, at last, I teach them to love.
Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries.
To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles.
It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;
I felt acutely that there was no excuse for it
but to sit around and be depressed when you are finally at a remove from trauma and your life is not a mess is awfully confusing and destabilizing.
I have a poor memory, and after that episode at camp I became afraid of what is lost through time, and I would lie in bed at night trying to remember things from the day so that I could keep them—an incorporeal acquisitiveness.
would come over me sometimes on Friday nights in college, when the noise of forced festivity overwhelmed the privacy of the darkness.
that sadness frightened me.
The only depressive tendency that was always present in me was nostalgia:
regret everything just because it is finished,
Even in the best of spirits, it’s always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort t...
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“I can do nothing. I understand nothing. I know nothing. Nothing. And all this misery does not even make me particularly unhappy.”
He said he had believed my relative stoicism on the phone.
We talked, and I felt overcome with more emotion than I’d felt in years. I felt myself shining; I felt ecstatic and did not guess how nothing good was to come of that. I rode from emotion to emotion in a way that was almost absurd.
That conversation was the last one I initiated; those were my last feelings for a long time.
It seems to depend on both hypothalamic functions (which regulate sleep, appetites, and energy) and cortical functions (which translate experience into philosophy and worldview).
The greatest danger with manic-depressive illness is that it sometimes bursts into what are called mixed states, where one is manically depressed—full of negative feeling and grandiose about them. That is a prime condition for causing suicide,
A breakdown is a crossover into madness. It is, to borrow a metaphor from physics, uncharacteristic behaviour of matter that is determined by hidden variables.
Then I began to cry, but there were no tears, only a heaving incoherence.
