I understood that going where I would actually be foreign might distract people from the more intimate nature of my defining otherness.
Disability scholars Andrienne Asch and Erik Parens, in their seminal discussion of the problem, wrote,’Pre-natal diagnosis reinforces the medical model that disability itself, not societal discrimination against people with disabilities, is the problem to be solved.
You can exorcise the demons of schizophrenics who perceive that there’s something foreign inside them. But it’s much harder with depressed people because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies.
If real experience has triggered your descent into depression, you have a human yen to understand it even when you have ceased to experience it; the limited of experience that is achieved with chemical pills is not tantamount to a cure.
It is the sincere horror of it that gets others motivated, so say Watson and Andrews; the dysfunction caused by the onset of depression may serve a useful function in that it is “a device for the elicitation of altruism.
Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, “Well, if my wife dies, I’ll find another one,” it wouldn’t be love as we know it. There’s no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy.
Mental illness is real illness.
If some glorious angel descended into my living room and offered to exchange my children for other, better children-brighter, kinder, funnier, more loving, more disciplined, more accomplished-I would clutch the ones I have and, like most parents, pray away the atrocious specter.
So many people have asked me what to do for depressed friends and relatives, and my answer is actually simple: blunt their isolation. Do it with cups of tea or with long talks or by sitting in a room nearby and staying silent or in whatever way suits the circumstances, but do that. And do it willingly.
I have no ambitions. I only have obsessions.
I believe that words are strong, that they can overwhelm what we fear when fear seems more awful than life is good. I have turned, with an increasingly fine attention, to love. Love is the other way forward. They need to go together: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine.
But you are never the same once you have acquired the knowledge that there is no self that will not crumble. We are told to learn self-reliance, but it’s tricky if you have no self on which to rely.
Is it depression when I think how I would prefer to go where they have gone, and to stop the maniacal struggle of staying alive? Or is it just a part of life, to keep living in all the ways we cannot stand?
Even in the best of spirits, it’s always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.
There is no life that does not have the material for despair in it, but some people go too close to the edge and others manage to stay sometimes sad in a safe clearing far from the cliffs.
You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.
Though many of us take pride in how different we are from our parents, we are endlessly sad at how different our children are from us.
I love the sense of vast transformation that hangs on us at this new millennium, the feeling that we are at the brink of knowing more than people have ever known before.
Life is fraught with sorrows: no matter what we do, we will in the end die; we are, each of us, held in the solitude of an autonomous body; time passes, and what has been will never be again.
Therapy allows a person to make sense of the new self he has attained on medication, and to accept the loss of self that occurred during a breakdown. You need to be reborn after a severe episode, and you need to learn the behaviors that may protect against relapse. You need to run your life differently from how you ran it before.