The Catholic Guide to Depression Quotes

“Contemplation, normally regarded as a private pursuit, needs communal support. We are most likely to risk its vulnerabilities and be faithful to its implications when we are embedded in a community that both invokes and witnesses our truth, a rare form of community in which we learn to be alone together, to support one another on a solitary journey. We practice being present to others without being invasive or evasive, neither trying to fix them with advice nor turning away when they share something distressing. Imagine yourself sitting by the bedside of a dying person, who is making the most solitary journey of all. Here, we must lose both the arrogance that makes us think we can fix the other, and the cowardice that tempts us to turn away. Since we are all dying all the time, why not practice this way of relating before the final hour?”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“Many of us are contemplatives by catastrophe. We start seeing beyond the veil only when it is rent by some crisis, personal, or societal, or both, that reveals things as they are.”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“The daily reading of good books can be a remedy for sadness, comfort in distress, and a helpful way to foster hope and fortitude.”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“Avoidance or merely the passage of time will not necessarily make the emotion dissipate. It is simply not true that time automatically heals all wounds.”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“gratitude is not a warm, fuzzy emotion that prevents the experience of negative emotions. Gratitude is a virtue, and therefore cultivating gratitude can be done even in the context of a depressive episode, although it will obviously be more challenging in these circumstances.”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“Suicide is the third leading cause of death overall among young people in the United States aged fifteen to twenty-five. Suicide rates among young people have risen over the past several years. An astonishing one in ten college students and one in five high school students seriously considered suicide during the past year. Women attempt suicide three times more often than men, but men complete suicide twice as often as women.”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again

“There is a temptation among Catholics to explain away depression as if there were no medical issue involved — simply a spiritual failure on the part of the sufferer. There is a powerful spiritual reality at play in depression, but the insinuation that the sufferer is somehow at fault gets things exactly backward: it is the innocence of the depressed one that is the key.”
― Aaron Kheriaty, The Catholic Guide to Depression: How the Saints, the Sacraments, and Psychiatry Can Help You Break Its Grip and Find Happiness Again