The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It’s a precious discovery.
It’s a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, “depression” to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.
Travel is a set of corrective lenses that helps focus the planet’s blurred reality.
You cannot understand the otherness of places you have not encountered. If all young adults were required to spend two weeks in a foreign country, two-thirds of the world’s diplomatic problems could be solved. It wouldn’t matter what country they visited or what they did during their stays.
Oppression sometimes benefits its victims more than its perpetrators.
This book’s conundrum is that most of the families described here have ended up grateful for experiences they would have done anything to avoid.
Hatred does not obliterate love. Indeed, the two are in constant fellowship.
Actually travel is the opposite of depression. Depression is a curling inward, and travel is an opening outward.
Disabled people are protected by fragile laws, and if they are judged to have an identity rather than an illness, they may forfeit those safeguards.
To wage war on depression is to fight against oneself, and it is important to know that in advance of the battles.
Nirvana occurs when you not only look forward to rapture, but also gaze back into the times of anguish and find in them the seeds of your joy. You may not have felt that happiness at the time, but in retrospect it is incontrovertible.
In typical circumstances, to have children who won’t care for you in your dotage is to be King Lear. Disability changes the reciprocity equation.
The only way to find out whether you’re depressed is to listen to and watch yourself, to feel your feelings and then think about them. If you feel bad without reason most of the time, you’re depressed. If you feel bad most of the time with reason, you’re also depressed, though changing the reasons may be a better way forward than leaving circumstance alone and attacking the depression. If the depression is disabling to you, then it’s major.
Depression claims more years than war, cancer, and AIDS put together. Other illnesses, from alcoholism to heart disease, mask depression when it causes them; if one takes that into consideration, depression may be the biggest killer on earth. Treatments.
In depression, all that is happening in the present is the anticipation of pain in the future, and the present qua present no longer exists at all. Depression is a condition that is almost unimaginable to anyone who has not known it.
People around depressives expect them to get themselves together: our society has little room in it for moping. Spouses, parents, children, and friends are all subject to being brought down themselves, and they do not want to be close to measureless pain.
Having anticipated the onward march of our selfish genes, many of us are unprepared for children who present unfamiliar needs. Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger, and the more alien the stranger, the stronger the whiff of negativity.
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.