If something or someone doesn’t work, it’s in a state of grace, progress, and evolution. It will attract love and empathy. If it does work, it has merely completed its job and is probably dead.
If everyone has the capacity for some measure of depression under some circumstances, everyone also has the capacity to fight depression to some degree under some circumstances. Often, the fight takes...
I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.
Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.
Everything passes away—suffering, pain, blood, hunger, pestilence. The sword will pass away too, but the stars will still remain when the shadows of our presence and our deeds have vanished from the e...
El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como también lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatía. La fe es una discapacidad en la medida en que restringe el interés personal; el ateísmo e...
Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,'Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discriminat...
But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it’s tricky if you have no self on which to rely.
All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent parents should accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves.
Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the...
About half of patients with pure anxiety disorders develop major depression within five years. Insofar as depression and anxiety are genetically determined, they share a single set of genes (which are...
The happy endings of tragedies have a dignity beyond the happy endings of comedies, that they not only transcend the mawkishness to which Howells alludes, but also produce a contentment more cherished...
We are all differently abled from one another, and context—which is socially constructed—often decides what will be protected and indulged.
There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all...
The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compellin...
The cliche about autism is that the syndrome impedes the ability to love, and I began this research interested in how much a parent could contrive to love a child who could not return the affection. A...
Since I am writing a book about depression, I am often asked in social situations to describe my own experiences, and I usually end by saying that I am on medication. Still? people ask. But you seem f...
She looked at me – I was crying, though she was not – and she took on a tone of gentle reprimand. ‘Don’t think you’re paying me some kind of tribute if you let my death become the great event of your...
Psychosis is a gross disturbance in an individual's ability to distinguish self from reality. For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and havi...
Perhaps the immutable error of parenthood is that we give our children what we wanted, whether they want it or not. We heal our wounds with the love we wish we’d received, but are often blind to the w...