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'...
The worst of depression lies in a present moment that cannot escape the past it idealizes or deplores.
The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and my life, as I write this, is vital.
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...
Some people have more highly activated left prefrontal cortexes and some people have more highly activated right prefrontal cortexes. (This has nothing to do with the question of hemispheric dominance...
Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only...
Perhaps depression can best be described as emotional pain that forces itself on us against our will, and then breaks free of its externals.
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.
My depression had grown on me as that vine had conquered the oak; it had been a sucking thing that had wrapped itself around me, ugly and more alive than I. It had had a life of its own that bit by bi...
Life itself seemed so alarmingly exigent, to require so much of the self. It was too difficult to remember and think and express and understand - all things I needed to be able to do to talk. To keep...
La depressione è un’incrinatura dell’amore. Per essere capaci di amare dobbiamo essere capaci di disperarci per ciò che perdiamo e la depressione è il meccanismo con cui esprimiamo questa disperazione...
It is too often the quality of happiness that you feel at every moment its fragility, while depression seems when you are in it to be a state that will never pass.
In the throws of depression, one reaches a strange point at which it is impossible to see the line between ones own theatricality and the reality of madness. I discovered two conflicting qualities of...
If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.
I was fascinated to hear of the suicide of an octopus, trained for the circus, that had been accustomed to do tricks for rewards of food. When the circus disbanded, the octopus was kept in a tank and...
I think all love is one-third projection and one-third acceptance and never more than one-third knowledge and insight.
I realized that I had demanded that my parents accept me but had resisted accepting them.
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...
El analfabetismo y la pobreza son discapacidades, como también lo son la imbecilidad, la obesidad y la apatía.