A Buddhist scholar once explained to me that most Westerners mistakenly think that Nirvana is what you arrive at when your suffering is over and only an eternity of happiness stretches ahead. But such...
The polar opposite of suffering [is] boredom. I believe that pain needs to be transformed but not forgotten; gainsaid but not obliterated. I
One loves and is loved in great pain, and one is alive in the experience of it. It is the walking-death quality of depression that I have tried to eliminate from my life;
Everything. I would never want depression to be a public or political excuse, but I think that once you have gone through it, you get a greater and more immediate understanding of the temporary absenc...
We are all differently abled from one another, and context—which is socially constructed—often decides what will be protected and indulged.
This book’s conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.
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...
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...
In typical circumstances, to have children who won't care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.
In the heat of an argument, my mother once told me, Someday you can go to a therapist and tell him all about how your terrible mother ruined your life. But it will be your ruined life you're talking a...
In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginabl...
If you attach better services to a diagnostic category, some doctors will apply that diagnosis to children from whom it is not entirely appropriate in order to access those services.
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 had thought that when you feel your worst your tears flood, but the very worst pain is the arid pain of total violation that comes after the tears are all used up, the pain that stops up every space...
Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.
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...
Cleaving to our own lives, with all their challenges and limitations and particularities, is vital.