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.
It is mad for adolescents to rage at parents who have done their best, but it is a conventional madness, uniform enough so that we tolerate it relatively unquestioningly.
I was walking down the street today,” she said, “and I thought, I am probably dying. And then I thought, should we have cherries or pears at lunch? And the two things felt too much the same.
I went to Cambodia to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.
I didn’t particularly want to die but I also didn’t at all want to live.
Biology is not destiny. There are ways to lead a good life with depression. Indeed, people who learn from their depression can develop a particular moral profundity from the experience, and this is the thing with feathers at the bottom of their box of miseries.
Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair. When it comes, it degrades one’s self and ultimately eclipses the capacity to give or receive affection. It is the aloneness within us made manifest, and it destroys not only connection to others but also the ability to be peacefully alone with oneself.
No one has ever suggested legal protections for ugly people to make up for the misaligned features that will compromise their personal and professional lives. For people disabled by inherent moral perplexity, we offer not support but imprisonment.
There is a basic emotional spectrum from which we cannot and should not escape, and I believe that depression is in that spectrum, located near not only grief but also love. Indeed I believe that all the strong emotions.
I guess being depressed all the time was actually a relatively safe place to be. I didn’t have the real-world worries that everyone else has because I knew that I simply couldn’t function well enough to take care of myself. What do I do now? Trying to break the habits of years of depression is what I’m doing for the moment with my doctor.
After you’ve forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity, you need to take the traumas and make them part of who you’ve come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph. Evincing a better self, in response to things that have caused you hurt.
Most people don’t like one another’s unhappiness very much. Few can cope with the idea of depression divorced from external reality. Many would prefer to think that if you’re suffering, it’s with reason and subject to logical resolution. A.
The monolithic problem of depression cannot be expressed with a monolithic response; depressions are contextual and must be interpreted within the contexts in which they occur.
To want to kill yourself, however, requires a whole extra level of passion and a certain directed violence.
Suicide is not the result of passivity; it is the result of an action taken. It requires a great deal of energy and a strong will in addition to a belief in the permanence of the present bad moment and at least a touch of impulsivity.
You are in touch with the real terribleness of your life. You can accept rationally that later, after the medication sets in, you will be better able to deal with the terribleness, but you will not be free of it.
I could not bring myself to believe in any love enough to imagine that the loss of me would be noticed, but I knew how sad it would be for him to have worked so hard at saving me and not to have succeeded.
To take medication as part of the battle is to battle fiercely, and to refuse it would be as ludicrously self-destructive as entering a modern war on horseback. It is not weak to take medications; it does not mean that you can’t cope with your personal life; it is courageous.
When I said that I had a history of mental illness, I was told that in that case I could not well expect anyone to take my views on these things seriously. “I’m a trained professional and I’m here to help you,” the doctor said. When I said that I was an experienced patient and knew that what she was doing was in fact injurious to me, she told me that I had not been to medical school and would just have to proceed according to what she judged an appropriate protocol.
I believe that the emergency room policy in which saying “I have had severe psychotic depression exacerbated by extreme pain” is treated much the same as saying “I have to have a woolly teddy bear with me before you can use sutures” is unacceptable.
There are fine but important distinctions between wanting to be dead, wanting to die, and wanting to kill yourself.