Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
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Read between June 22 - June 25, 2021
3%
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For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of Is come unto me. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came. —Job
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That the word “indescribable” should present itself is not fortuitous, since it has to be emphasized that if the pain were readily describable most of the countless sufferers from this ancient affliction would have been able to confidently depict for their friends and loved ones (even their physicians) some of the actual dimensions of their torment, and perhaps elicit a comprehension that has been generally lacking; such incomprehension has usually been due not to a failure of sympathy but to the basic inability of healthy people to imagine a form of torment so alien to everyday experience.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
Yes
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It had become clear that I would never be granted even a few minutes’ relief from my full-time exhaustion.
50%
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Ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.
69%
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even a few words came to seem to me too long-winded,
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
Yes
72%
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I’m convinced I should have been in the hospital weeks before. For, in fact, the hospital was my salvation, and it is something of a paradox that in this austere place with its locked and wired doors and desolate green hallways—ambulances screeching night and day ten floors below—I found the repose, the assuagement of the tempest in my brain, that I was unable to find in my quiet farmhouse.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
A very perfect statement on the importance and the stigma of the hospital I will rise my review to 4 because of this statement
72%
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a transfer out of the too familiar surroundings of home, where all is anxiety and discord, into an orderly and benign detention where one’s only duty is to try to get well.
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For me the real healers were seclusion and time.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
Yes me too
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Even those for whom any kind of therapy is a futile exercise can look forward to the eventual passing of the storm.
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If they survive the storm itself, its fury almost always fades and then disappears.
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Mysterious in its coming, mysterious in its going, the affliction runs its cour...
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Bashayer Noury (Bash)
The perfect description for depression.
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BY FAR THE GREAT MAJORITY OF THE PEOPLE WHO go through even the severest depression survive it, and live ever afterward at least as happily as their unafflicted counterparts.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
The silver lining
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I still look back on his concern with immense gratitude. The help he gave me, he later said, had been a continuing therapy for him, thus demonstrating that, if nothing else, the disease engenders lasting fellowship.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
Super cute
80%
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After I began to recover in the hospital it occurred to me to wonder—for the first time with any really serious concern—why I had been visited by such a calamity.
82%
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Thus depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for decades.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
Yes
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One can be sure that these words have been more than once employed to conjure the ravages of melancholia, but their somber foreboding has often overshadowed the last lines of the best-known part of that poem, with their evocation of hope. To most of those who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
Explaining The poem
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For those who have dwelt in depression’s dark wood, and known its inexplicable agony, their return from the abyss is not unlike the ascent of the poet, trudging upward and upward out of hell’s black depths and at last emerging into what he saw as “the shining world.” There, whoever has been restored to health has almost always been restored to the capacity for serenity and joy, and this may be indemnity enough for having endured the despair beyond despair.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
What hope look like in words this is beautiful
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E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle. And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.
Bashayer Noury (Bash)
What a beautiful ending