depression

"Wednesday's child is full of woe." And only six more days to go.

"Reboinoi shel olom, vo bistu? Vi kanstu tzukuken un shveigen? Nein, nein, es iz nishto kein Got!"

The weather of depression is unmodulated, its light a brownout.
William Styron

D-type score = C 1 (MHPG) - C 2 (VMA) + C 3 (NE) - C 4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C 0
Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, 1989

My soul is deprived of peace.
I have forgotten what happiness is.
I tell myself that my future is lost...
Lamentations

Some struggles are so solitary that they drown in words.
Martha Manning

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain in unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron

There is no doubt that as one nears the penultimate depths of depression, the acute sense of loss is connected with a knowledge of life slipping away at accelerated speed.
William Styron

If you compare our knowledge (about depression) to Columbus's discovery of America, America is yet unknown; we are still down on that little island in the Bahamas.
a clinician, to William Styron

Depression isn't caused by some mythical biochemical imbalance. It's another word for hopelessness.
Peter Breggin

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come....If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
William Styron

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
Randall Jerrell

"Mental illness" is a metaphor. Minds can be "sick" only in the sense that jokes are "sick" or economies are "sick."
Thomas Szasz

Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Mark Twain

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

O, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill,
To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms....These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters....One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.
Virginia Woolf

One feels inclined to doubt sometimes whether the dragons of primeval days are really extinct.
Sigmund Freud

Labour must be the cure, not sympathy—Labour is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow.
Charlotte Brontë

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.
John Steinbeck

I was taught to feel, perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of solitude.
William Wordsworth

One can only see what one observes, and one observes only things which are already in the mind.
Alphonse Bertillon

...To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
William Wordsworth

Everything is meaningless, says the teacher, utterly meaningless! What do people get for their hard work? Generations come and go, but nothing really changes...
Ecclesiastes

Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury.
Signifying nothing.
William Shakespeare

To increase knowledge only increases sorrow.
Ecclesiastes

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it...yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixition of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
Joseph Campbell

To whom can I speak today?
[One's] fellows are evil;
The friends of today do not love...
Hearts are rapacious:
Every man siezed his fellow's good...
The gentle man has perished,
[But] the violent man has access to everybody...
Their are no righteous;
The land is left to those who do wrong...
To whom can I speak today? I am laden with wretchedness
For lack of intimate friends....
The Dialogue of a Misanthrope with His Own Soul

a living death
?

In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

The privacy of the mind is an impermeable barrier.
Kay Jamison

When the low heavy sky weighs like a lid
Upon the spirit aching for the light
And all the wide horizon's line is hid
By a black day sadder than any night

And hearses without drum or instrument,
File slowly through my soul; crushed, sorrowful,
Weeps Hope, and Grief, fierce and omnipotent,
Plants his black banner on my drooping skull.
John Wolfgang von Goethe

I will endeavour not not to repay you in notes of sorrow and despondence, though all my sprightly chords seem broken.
William Cowper

The flower that smiles today
Tomorrow dies;
All that we wish to stay,
Tempts and then flies.

Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou—and from thy sleep
Then wake to weep.
Percy Bysshe Shelley

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;
And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.
Merchant of Venice's Antonio

All dis-ease is not disease.
Viktor E. Frankl


The night
was late and soggy: It was
New York in July.
I was in my room, hiding,
hating the need to swallow.
Elizabeth Prince

I have felt the wind of the wing of madness.
Baudelaire

Learn the darkness.
Gather round you all
the things that you love, name
their names, prepare
to lose them. It will be
as if all you know were turned
around within your body.
Wendell Berry

I measure every gried I meet
with analytic eyes;
I wonder if it weighs like mine,
Or has an easier size.
I wonder if they bore it long,
Or did it just begin?
I could not tell the date of mine,
It feels so old a pain.

I wonder if it hurts to live,
And if they have to try,
And whether could they choose between,
They would not rather die.
Emily Dickinson

It (depression) is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia wholly unknown to normal life.
William James

...Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a call to spiritual solitude and liberty may come to us masked as a humiliating sickness or weakness.
Thomas Merton

When depression is stigmatized as illness and weakness, a double bind is created: If we admit to depression, we will be stigmatized by others; if we feel it but do not admit it, we stigmatize ourselves, internalizing the social judgment. The only remaining choice may be truly sick behavior: to experience no emotion at all.
Lesley Hazelton

Life is a banquent, and most poor suckers are starving to death.
Rosalind Russell

Depression is rage spread thin.
George Santayana

If depression is creeping up and must be faced, learn something about the nature of the beast: You may escape without a mauling.
R. W. Shepherd

If we admit our depression openly and freely, those around us get from it an experience of freedom rather than the depression itself.
Rollo May

Suffering, once accepted, loses its edge, for the terror of it lessens, and what remains is generally far more manageable than we had imagined.
Lesley Hazelton

Age is the bilge we cannot shake from the mop.
Robert Lowell

You handle depression in much the same way you handle a tiger.
R. W. Shepherd

The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression. Gary Larson

...And I'm alive.
And I'm alone.
And I never wanted to be either of those.
Chemical Brothers

Death is not the greatest loss in life.
The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.
Norman Cousins

So few my roads,
So many the mistakes.
Esenin

Our present is all void and dreariness,
If consecration come not from without.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal

It is one of the saddest rules of life that painful things that cannot be changed must be endured.
John T. Maltsberger

If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Examination of the temporal factor in depression reveals that, in its preinternalized form, the hostility is clearly Oedipal in nature, being direted as it is toward the inexorable marching of Father Time.
Christopher Scribner

hostility turned inward
Sigmund Freud

He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.
Aeschylus

To whom should I speak today?
I am heavy-laden with misery
& without a comforter.
Anonymous

Pain or suffering of any kind, if long continued, causes depression and lessens the power of action; yet it is well adapted to make a creature guard itself against any great or sudden evil.
Charles Darwin

sickness unto death
Søren Kierkegaard


human perplexity and helplessness in the face of nature's dreaded forces
Sigmund Freud

I drink not from mere joy in wine nor to scoff at faith—no, only to forget myself for a moment, that only do I want of intoxication, that alone.
Omar Khayyam

Great is my sorrow, without limits. None knows of it, except God in Heaven, and He cannot have pity.
Søren Kierkegaard

... people who are afraid of living are also especially frightened of death.
Médard Boss

great necessities of fate, against which there is no remedy
Sigmund Freud

painful riddle of death
Sigmund Freud

the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself—of one's emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one's destiny.
Sigmund Freud

...the human animal is characterized by two great fears that other animals are protected from: the fear of life and the fear of death.
Ernest Becker

For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost.
José Ortega y Gasset

Our fear of death is really our fear of life.
Robert E. Neale

In the midst of life we are in death.
?

Death is a truth made profound by the size of our wonder.
?

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

Most people die at thirty and are buried at sixty.
Shaw

The despair of the living dead "is the disconsolateness of not being able to die."
Søren Kierkegaard

I'm living a life I don't wish to live.
Virginia Woolf

Man, when he does not grieve, almost ceases to exist.
?

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.
Virginia Woolf

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking?—the entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world—a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.
Virginia Woolf

Nothing exaggerates the torture of childhood. People say children are happy. They forget the terrible revelations...the sudden shadows on the ceilings.
Virginia Woolf

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages
Virginia Woolf

The promise that on the other side of depression liesa beautiful life, one worth surviving suicide for, will have turned out wrong. It will all be a big dupe.
Elizabeth Wurtzel

Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
Virginia Woolf

Very early in my life it was too late.
Marguerite Duras

Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway

How can you hide from what never goes away?
Heraclitus

I myself am hell.
Robert Lowell


Love hurts.
Nazareth

I would say that learning to know anxiety is an adventure which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition either by not having know anxiety or by sinking under it. He therefore who has learned rightly to be anxious has learned the most important thing.
Søren Kierkegaard

Don't nobody know my troubles with God.
Moby

I cannot do anything new. I cannot see anything new!
Ecclesiastes

Pain is a climate like winter. It closes over you and soon you can't imagine not living in it.
Helen Dunmore

For it is not death or hardship that is a fearful thing, but the fear of death and hardship.
Epictetus

Hope...It is the quintessential delusion.
"Architect," Matrix Reloaded

All human life can be interpreted as a continuous attempt to avoid despair.
Paul Tillich

Sweet is't to sleep, sweeter to be a stone.
In this dread age of terror and of shame,
Thrice blest is he who neither sees nor feels.
Leave me then here, and trouble not my rest.
Michelangelo

When thou dost feel creeping time at they gate, these fooleries will please thee less: I am past my relish for such matters.
Queen Elizabeth I

Sometimes I wish a cat would eat me.
"Milhouse," The Simpsons

Parting is a foretaste of death.
Arthur Schopenhauer

The Averted
The one whose eyes
do not meet yours
is alone at heart
and looks where the dead look
for an ally in his cause.
Les Murray

He who is without hope is also without fear: this is the meaning of the expresion "desperate." If ... he is even brought to the point of believing that what he does not desire to happen must happen and what he desires to happen can never happen simply becase he desires it, then this is the condition called despair.
Arthur Schopenhauer