I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever.
I was certainly going the right way for a stroke when I left Paris. I paid for it nicely afterwards! When I stopped drinking, when I stopped smoking so much, when I began to think again instead of trying not to think - Good Lord, the depression and the prostration of it! Work in these magnificent natural surroundings (Arles) has restored my morale, but even now some efforts are too much for me: my strength fails me.
Funk, gospel, blues is all out of slavery times, out of depression, out of sorrow.
A lot of people don't realize that not everybody gets high.
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable
Today is the tomorrow we worried about yesterday.
The depression belongs to all of us. I think of the family down the road whose mother was having a baby and they went around the neighborhood saying, "We're pregnant. " I want to go around the neighborhood saying, "We're depressed. " If my mum can't get out of bed in the morning, all of us feel the same. Her silence has become ours, and it's eating us alive.
The opposite of play is not work—the opposite of play is depression.
Maybe I'm needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren't needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I'd obviously be psychotic.
I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.
The soul is innocent and immortal, it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse.
Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and hallelujah is our song.
You know all that sympathy that you feel for an abused child who suffers without a good mom or dad to love and care for them? Well, they don't stay children forever. No one magically becomes an adult the day they turn eighteen. Some people grow up sooner, many grow up later. Some never really do. But just remember that some people in this world are older versions of those same kids we cry for.
Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting
I inherited depression from my mother's side of the family.
I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
It is important to remember that at first blush, going sane feels just like going crazy.
Depression is to me as daffodils were to Wordsworth.
I know from personal experience how damaging it can be to live with bitterness and unforgiveness. I like to say it's like taking poison and hoping your enemy will die. And it really is that harmful to us to live this way.