Quotes & Sayings About Suffering From Depression

All of us must do our best to live gracefully in the present moment. I now see depression as akin to being tied to a chair with restraints on my wrists. It took me a long time to realize that I only magnify my distress by struggling for freedom. My pain diminished when I gave up trying to escape completely from it. However, don't interpret my current approach to depression as utterly fatalistic. I do whatever I can to dull depression's pain, while premising my life on its continuing presence. The theologian and philosopher Thomas Moore puts it well with his distinction between cure and care. While cure implies the eradication of trouble, care "appreciates the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illusion of a problem-free life. — David A. Karp

The thing about depression is that, if you're not the one who's actually suffering from it, there's very little you can do to be proactive. If someone in your family is depressed, all you can really do is send them to the shrink, get them their meds, be gentle, and wait. — Sarah Silverman

When someone is suffering from anxieties, depression, and stress, the only treatment is to change awareness and consciousness. — Debasish Mridha

For six days I didn't get up except to make a cup of tea, or fry an egg, or lie in the skinny bath gazing at a cracked ceiling. The days punished me with their slowness, piling up the hours on me, spreading their joylessness about the room.
A doctor would have said I was suffering from depression. Everything I have read since suggests this was the case. But when you are in the grip of something like that it doesn't usefully announce itself. No. what happens is you sit in a dark, dark cave, and you wait. If you are lucky there is a pinprick of light, and if you are especially lucky that pinprick will grow larger and larger, until one day the cave appears to slip behind, and just like that you find yourself in daylight and free. This is how it happened for me. — Lloyd Jones

Americans are suffering so much from being in unrewarding environments that it has made us very cynical. I think that American suburbia has become a powerful generator of anxiety and depression. — James Howard Kunstler

If a person's basic state of mind is serene and calm, then it is possible for this inner peace to overwhelm a painful physical experience. On the other hand, if someone is suffering from depression, anxiety, or any form of emotional distress, then even if he or she happens to be enjoying physical comforts, he will not really be able to experience the happiness that these could bring. — Dalai Lama

Eventually sinking into despair, [Heinrich von Kleist] shot himself in 1811 as part of a suicide pact made with a woman suffering from incurable cancer. — Nicholas Tucker

People often write me and ask how I keep my wood floors so clean when I live with a child and a dog, and my answer is that I use a technique called Suffering From a Mental Illness. — Heather Armstrong

And that fear I'd felt, the disembodying confusion, seemed to be a drug I was now addicted to, because moving through the ordinary world- watching CNN, reading the Times, walking to Sant Ambroeus to have a coffee at the bar- made me feel exhausted, even depressed. Perhaps I was suffering from the same problem as the man who'd sailed around the world and now on land, facing his farmhouse, his wife and kids, understood that the constancy of home stretching out before him like a dry flat field was infinitely more terrifying than any violent squall with thirty-foot swells. — Marisha Pessl

As we have said, robust souls are sometimes almost, but not entirely, overthrown by strokes of misfortune ... Despair has steps leading upward. From total depression we rise to despondency, from despondency to affliction, from affliction to melancholy. Melancholy is a twilight state in which suffering transmutes into a somber joy ... Melancholy is the enjoyment of being sad. — Victor Hugo

'The Big Girls' has always seemed to me to be a story about different kinds of families - a divorced mother with a child; a father with his child and his girlfriend; a mother of three children, suffering from postpartum depression; and the rigid artificial families maintained by women in prison - all potentially perilous. — Susanna Moore

There's no thrilling anticipation of the day's first cup of coffee ... nor the eye-closing delight of that first swallow of sauvignon blanc in the evening. We cats have no access to everyday mood-enhancing substances. Apart from humble catnip, there is no pharmaceutical refuge if we're suffering from boredom, depression, existential crisis, or even an everyday headache. — David Michie

It's a favorite myth in our culture that hardship makes you a better person, that is is merely the grindstone on which your essence is refined and polished. But the truth is that scarcity, depression, thwarted ambition, and suffering most often leave the person a little twisted. That is the territory where mean drunks and tyrannical bastards come from. — Jessa Crispin

A small insect, clearly suffering from acute depression, decided that my open mouth was the ideal route for a suicide mission. With kamikaze-like determination, it rocketed down my throat and splattered against my tonsils. - Calma Harrison — Barry Jonsberg

Artemis: (shocked) Why, Doctor? This is a sensitive area. For all you know I could be suffering from depression.
Doctor Po: I suppose you could. Is that the case?
Artemis: (head in hands) It's my mother, Doctor.
Doctor Po: Yes?
Artemis: My mother, she ...
Doctor Po: Your mother, yes?
Artemis: She forces me to endure this ridiculous therapy when the school's so-called counsellors are little better than misguided do-gooders with degrees. — Eoin Colfer

I want to escape from myself. For when I do start up and stare myself seedily in the face, as happens to be my case at present, my blankness is inconceivable
indescribable
my misery amazing. — Charles Dickens

An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but also the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself — Alejandra Pizarnik

And pain is relative; My particulars may be "better" of "worse" than the patient next to me, but individually our biological framework limits our ability to tolerate suffering; that is what brings us to out knees, flips the switch of our depression, and forces us to retreat from the rest of the world. That is what we have in common. — Gail Griffith

Depression was a foreign word to them, an American thing. In their opinion their children were immune from the hardships and injustices they had left behind in India, as if the inoculations the pediatrician had given Sudha and Rahul when they were babies guaranteed them an existence free of suffering. — Jhumpa Lahiri

Not only are poor, unemployed, less will-educated and non-white people more likely to become depressed, but they are also least likely to benefit from treatment by either antidepressants or psychotherapy. That is why combating depression requires more than merely providing effective treatment for those who are already suffering from it. We also need the change the social conditions - such a racism, unemployment, poverty, unaffordable housing, and lack of adequate education - that put people at increased risk of becoming depressed. — Irving Kirsch

I learned that I suffered from bipolar II disorder, a less serious variant of bipolar I, which was once known as manic depression. The information was naturally frightening; up to 1 in 5 people with bipolar disorder will commit suicide, and rates may even be higher for those suffering from bipolar II. — Ayelet Waldman

No one can sing well, play well, or write well, without living through moments of the deepest pain and anguish. Every real talent has known times of torturing depression when the heart in its agony has cried out to God: "Why hast Thou forsaken me? What have I done that I should suffer so?" And then, at the very darkest moment, suddenly, the veil is torn from their eyes! Truth, with her flaming torch, stands before them, and they understand that God sends them suffering to strengthen and ennoble their talent, that it may touch men's hearts and show to tired wanderers on earth glimpses of heaven. — Aimee Dostoyevsky

I'll say it again - mental illness is a physical illness. You wouldn't consider going up to someone suffering from Alzheimers to yell, "Come on, get with it, you remember where you left your keys?" Let us shout it from the rooftops until everyone gets the message; depression has and nothing to do with having a bad day or being sad, it's a killer if not taken seriously. — Ruby Wax

Like an attack this melancholy comes from time to time. I don't know at what intervals, and slowly covers my sky with clouds. It begins with an unrest in the heart, with a premonition of anxiety, probably with my dreams at night. People, houses, colors, sounds that otherwise please me become dubious and seem false. Music gives me a headache. All my mail becomes upsetting and contains hidden arrows. At such times, having to converse with people is torture and immediately leads to scenes ... Anger, suffering, and complaints are directed at everything, at people, at animals, at the weather, at God, at the paper in the book one is reading, at the material of the very clothing one has on. But anger, impatience, complaints and hatred have no effect on things and are deflected from everything, back to myself. — Hermann Hesse

If you are reading this book and you feel that way too then you are not alone. I understand how you feel. I think that anyone who has suffered from even mild depression understands how it feels. Yet we forget that others understand our suffering. We withdraw, isolate or shut down completely. We lose ourselves in our selves, and in the illness.
It doesn't have to be that way. If we connect with even one other human being who understands, we take one step out of the illness. Life is about connection. There is nothing else. Depression is the opposite; it is an illness defined by alienation. So I offer this book by way of connection. I offer it, too, as a source of hope. I hope that by sharing what I was like, what happened and what I am like now, that it may bring someone else comfort. — Sally Brampton

Suffering from depression? Just exercise a lot, socialize more, eat better, and do all the other things depression prevents you from doing. — Unknown

Almost all people suffer some form of intense inner pain at some times in their lives. The suffering might be depression, anxiety, substance abuse, or suicidal thoughts and it results from the battles we wage against our thoughts as we futilely try to get rid of our historie. — Steven C. Hayes

Negative thinking patterns can be immensely deceptive and persuasive, and change is rarely easy. But with patience and persistence, I believe that nearly all individuals suffering from depression can improve and experience a sense of joy and self-esteem once again. — David D. Burns

Then again, as those who suffer from it know, intractable depression creates a planet all its own, largely impermeable to influence from others except as shadow presences, urging you to come out and rejoin the world, take in a movie, go out for a bite, cheer up. — Daphne Merkin

Part of me was afraid that if I raised my fist to the sky and demanded an answer now, I would hear a thundering and calloused, 'Because I said so," from God in heaven. And I may not ever want to speak to Him again. — Sarah Thebarge

I suffer from depression. Severe cases of it. Not one case of depression, not a severe case, but severe cases of depression. Music is my only outlet, it's therapeutic to me. It's a release. It's how I vent emotionally. — Kevin Gates

To combat depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection
a procedure which can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end. — Friedrich August Von Hayek