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DEPRESSION IS THE flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.
You lose the ability to trust anyone, to be touched, to grieve. Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.
Rebuilding of the self in and after depression requires love, insight, work, and, most of all, time.
Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.
severely threatening life events are responsible for triggering initial depression. These events typically involve loss—of a valued person, of a role, of an idea about yourself—and are at their worst when they involve humiliation or a sense of being trapped. Depression can also be caused by positive change. Having a baby, getting a promotion, or getting married are almost as likely to kindle depression as a death or loss.
It is clear that stress drives up rates of depression. The biggest stress is humiliation; the second is loss.
“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.
The wish for a more visible illness was, I would later learn, a commonplace among depressives, who often engage in forms of self-mutilation to bring the physical state in line with the mental.
The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.
the same person who would in the eighteenth century have suffered from fainting spells and convulsive cries, who would in the nineteenth century have had hysterical paralysis or contracture, is now likely to suffer depression, chronic fatigue, or anorexia.
hunting escapades and near escapes from death;
storytellers given to laughter,
“Kayak anxiety,” the belief contra reality that water is in your boat and you will sink and drown, was the most common form of paranoia.
If you have any inclination whatsoever towards depression, don’t use cocaine: no matter how good you may feel during the initial rush, you will feel terrible afterwards, much more terrible than can possibly be worth it.
I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for a circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus was disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and no one paid any attention to his tricks. He gradually lost colour (octopuses’ states of mind are expressed in their shifting hues) and finally went through his tricks a last time, failed to be rewarded, and used his beak to stab himself so badly that he died.
An awful lot of people lead lives of quiet desperation and don’t kill themselves because they cannot muster the wherewithal to do it.
In the fifth century, Cassian writes of the “sixth combat” with “weariness and distress of the heart,” saying that “this is ‘the noonday demon’ spoken of in the Ninetieth Psalm,” which “produces dislike of the place where one is, disgust, disdain, and contempt for other men, and sluggishness.” The section in question occurs in Psalms and would be literally translated from the Vulgate: “His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night. / Of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark: of invasion, or of the
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Some people suffer mild depression and are totally disabled by it; others suffer severe depression and make something of their lives anyway. “Some people can function through anything,” says David McDowell, who works on substance abuse at Columbia. “That doesn’t mean they’re having less pain.
