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...
There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don'...
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...
The sprinter unwisely indulges his arrogance against the marathon runner, and likewise, parents who encourage their children's narcissism do them no favours. It is best to accomplish something before...
The danger is that being pushed towards early specialisation can leave children believing that they have only one way to succeed...Prodigies who don't make it will have worked insanely hard on somethi...
The cumulative results of the brain’s chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a...
The Princeton ethicist Peter Singer has espoused the right of women to choose abortion through to the end of pregnancy and to commit infanticide on newborns if they so choose. He has defended this pos...
That, in essence, is the catastrophe of suicide for those who survive: not only the loss of someone, but the loss of the chance to persuade that person to act differently, the loss of the chance to co...
Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals. Depression is not just a lot of pain; but too much pain can...
People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves...
Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth.
Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in...
Ne exprimăm iubirea, deoarece satisfacția adusă de iubire este enormă, și continuăm să ne exprimăm iubirea și să acționăm protector, deoarece pierderea iubirii e traumatizantă. Dacă n-am simți durere...
My goal is to stay safely in between self-analysis and self-destruction.
It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression)
I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.
I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight.
I did not want to sit on the roof, though I was also aware that if I didn’t allow myself the relief of considering suicide, I would soon explode from within and commit suicide. I felt the fatal tentac...