In depression. . . faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. . . It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.
The government is now in a position to do what Franklin D. Roosevelt did during the Great Depression of the 1930s - use a crisis of the times to create new institutions that will last for generations. To this day, we are still subsidizing millionaires in agriculture because farmers were having a tough time in the 1930s.
You have lost all delight in life. Ahead is a large array of blind alleys. You are half-deliberately, half-desperately cutting off your grip on creative life. You are becoming a neuter machine. You cannot love, even if you knew how to begin to love. Every thought is a devil, a hell-if you could do a lot of things over again, ah, how differently you would do them! You want to go home, back to the womb. You watch the world bang door after door in your face, numbly, bitterly. You have forgotten the secret you knew, once, ah, once, of being joyous, of laughing, of opening doors.
Only those with skin as thick as elephant hide can hope to sail through their teens unscathed by self-doubt and bouts of depression.
Are psychiatric crises so overwhelming to the mind that they inhibit the presence of ethics? Is depression at root an amoral phenomenon, its focus on the self preventing any other from really counting? Perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes, even when we are two we are really only one; we can feel nothing but our own bones, our own difficult breaths.
It's enough just to speak when spoken to, to give some minimal reaction to a stimulus. But to actually be the stimulus doesn't even occur to me.
I was born in 1928 and by 1931 the Depression was beginning to mount.
I'm the only person of distinction who has ever had a depression named for him.
Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm.
I didn't want to wake up. I was having a much better time asleep. And that's really sad. It was almost like a reverse nightmare, like when you wake up from a nightmare you're so relieved. I woke up into a nightmare.
But what is madness, if not being able to control your own mind?
This is the freeing truth you can learn through your depression: You weren't created to love and worship anything more than you love and worship God; and when you do, you'll feel bad. God has made you to feel pain when you've got other treasures that you've placed above Him. He wants you to treasure Him.
. . . And then I heard them lift a box, And creak across my soul With those same boots of lead, again, Then space began to toll.
There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.
That's what depression had wrought inside me: one, vast, barren rock garden-without the garden
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.
When you're lost in those woods, it sometimes takes you a while to realize that you are lost. For the longest time, you can convince yourself that you've just wandered off the path, that you'll find your way back to the trailhead any moment now. Then night falls again and again, and you still have no idea where you are, and it's time to admit that you have bewildered yourself so far off the path that you don't even know from which direction the sun rises anymore.
One of the most common outcomes of a depressive illness is a mistreated body. Now is the time to treat your body well. The more you learn to treat yourself well now, the less treatment you'll need down the road.
Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God himself is mad.
Compared to America or Europe, God isn't a big part of our lives here. I don't know anyone here who goes to church when he's had a rough divorce or is going through depression. We go out into nature instead.