Many coping strategies have a Zen simplicity. Instead of resolving chaos, find beauty and happiness amid chaos. I am reminded of a friend who said that when she found out her husband couldn’t fill her...
It is not true that love is not love which alters when it alteration finds. Love alters all the time; it is fluid, in perceptual flux, an evolving business across a lifetime.
It is my experience that the hard numbers are the ones that lie. The matters that they describe cannot be defined so clearly. The most accurate statement that can be made on the frequency of depressio...
If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression)
I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand
Aunque muchos de nosotros nos sentimos orgullosos de lo diferentes que somos de nuestros padres, nos entristece lo diferentes que nuestros hijos son de nosotros.
At least three times as many mentally ill people are in jail as are in hospitals.
You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now y...
Mild depression is a gradual and sometimes permanent thing that undermines people the way rust weakens iron. It is too much grief at too slight a cause, pain that takes over from the other emotions an...
Unlike Edith Piaf, I regret everything just because it is finished,
You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there’s something foreign inside them. But it’s much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the tr...
When parents say, ‘I wish my child did not have autism,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.’ Read that...
We must look for faith (in anything: God or the self or other people or politics or beauty or just about anything else) and structure. We must help the disenfranchised whose suffering undermines so mu...
We learn so much from our children—in patience, in humility, in gratitude for other blessings we had accepted before as a matter of course; so much in tolerance; so much in faith—believing and trustin...
Treating an identity as an illness invites real illness to make a braver stand.
Too often, treatments address only half the problem: they focus on the presence or on the absence. It is necessary both to cut away that extra thousand pounds of the vines and to relearn a root system...
Thinking seems to me less persuasive evidence of being than does choosing. Not in our chemistry and not in circumstance does our humanity lie, but in our will to work with the technologies available t...
There is no question that modern life carries burdens incompatible with the brains we have evolved. Depression may, then, well be a consequence of our doing what we did not evolve to do.
There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs. Once you cr...
There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person; indeed, love tends to magnify the burden. These parents need space for their ambivalence, whether they can allow i...