Why can't I remember our family Christmas, or a warm spring day, or anything that might have been pleasant? It is as though the filter of recall is itself altered, so that it blocks out everything but the darkest colors of the spectrum.
This is what Helen has learned: it is possible to be so tired you cannot reach for the sky, you cannot breathe. You can’t even talk. You can’t pick up the phone. You can’t do a dish or dance or cook or do up your own zipper.
I pop the lenses out of my sunglasses that way I see the bright side of things because if you always look at the dark side of things your not seeing the brightness that all things have and it's like you're stuck in a cloud of darkness
Rather than assuming weakness or defectiveness, we should acknowledge that getting through depression requires considerable strength. Rather than assuming permanent debility, we should recognize that some depressions are followed by thriving.
What happens is my mind starts to go in circles, thinking and thinking, and then I can't sleep. And once a couple of days go by, if you haven't slept, you start to get sick. You can't eat. You start to cry. It just feeds on itself.
If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me.
Then, after showing the pill and some graphics, those same people appeared again, looking happier.The Reb and I watched in silence. After it ended, he asked, "Do you think those pills work?"Not like that, I said."No," he agreed. "Not like that.
It's my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other easily understood disease just to make it easier on me and also on them.
In my view, prescribing antidepressant drugs is too often a quick and easy substitute for developing treatment plans that address the totality of health concerns and lifestyle factors that have an impact on wellness, including emotional wellness.
Sometimes I feel like all the crap in the world is building up inside me, like all the bad is just filling me like a balloon. I push it all back, live my happy life.But sometimes that balloon exposed and all the crap lands on everything around me.
The wordlessness of depression is a galling experience. You can't phone your friends, writing an e-mail is beyond you, you can't put pen to paper. The disease is a crash course in meaninglessness, lack of structure, the collapse of form.
The fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me…since the hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.
I've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.
I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired.
However, robust evidence shows that people systematically overestimate the probability of positive future contingencies, and underestimate the probability of negative ones — only those who are depressed or dysphoric come to accurate assessments.
