#depression

Depression is not madness, it's just depression, the loser version, the low-energy response to bad stuff that happens in your life. When you're depressed, you think you're the only one to have ever tasted this kind of hurt. And that lonely self-regard brings with it its own painful pleasure. ↗

— Ana Menéndez

#life

After a while, it all started to fade. No more pain, no more unwanted thoughts and no sound. Just darkness. I welcomed it. I was done. ↗

— Ani San

#depression #heartbroken #life #pain #life

Poverty entails fear and stress and sometimes depression. It meets a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts that is something on which to pride yourself but poverty itself is romanticized by fools. ↗

— J. K. Rowling

#depression #efforts #entails #fear #fools

Logic doesn't overcome pain. ↗

— Claudia Strauss

#life

It is madness. And if you don't know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity. It's the same with self-loathing. You're probably just normal and normal-looking but that's not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you're probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust. If you don't know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in. ↗

— Emma Forrest

#life-and-living #life

Life is merely terrible; I feel it as few others do. Often — and in my inmost self perhaps all the time — I doubt whether I am a human being. ↗

— Franz Kafka

#existentialism #life

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory. ↗

— Antonella Gambotto-Burke

#biochemical-phenomenon #cause-and-symptom #disinhibition #doctors #drugs

If suffering like hers had any use, she reasoned, it was not to the sufferer. The only way that an individual's pain gained meaning was through its communication to others. ↗

— Diane Wood Middlebrook

#helping-others #mental-illness #relating #self-disclosure #suffering

I am diagnosed with not having enough insanely-addictive drugs coursing through my body. ↗

— Sarah Silverman

#medicine #courage

Everything was usual. That was depression: being stuck, clinging to an out-of-date version of oneself. ↗

— Edward St. Aubyn

#dating