Frozen anger. Sigmund Freud
Spike still suffered with severe depressions. The Unforgettable Spike Milligan, ITV 2010
It is non-directional. Spike Milligan
Me Depressed? Don’t Make Me Laugh. Spike Milligan interview, cited I Told You I Was Ill: The Life and Legacy of Spike Milligan, 2004
It so transforms you into a different person. ibid.
Woy-Woy is a good place to commit suicide. ibid.
I was the most famous manic depressive in England. ibid.
Just when I had made my today
Secure with safe yesterdays
I see tomorrow coming with its pale glass star called hope.
It shatters on impact
And falls like splinters of cruel rain
And I see the red oil of life
running from my wrists
onto tomorrow’s headlines. Spike Milligan, Hope
Librium. Valium. Mogadon. Spike Milligan, Q9, The Reverend Franklin with a few kind words, BBC 1980
I’m so depressed. Maybe if I took two more Aspirin it would help. Play It Again, Sam 1972 starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton & Jerry Lacy & Tony Roberts & Susan Anspach & Jennifer Salt & Joy Bang & Susanne Zenor & Diana Davila et al, director Herbert Ross
[Jewish mother looks pitifully at child] ‘He’s been depressed. All of a sudden he can’t do anything.’ Annie Hall 1977 starring Woody Allen & Diane Keaton & Tony Roberts & Carol Kane & Paul Simon & Janet Margolin & Shelley Duvall & Christopher Walken & Colleen Dewhurst & Donald Symington & Marshall McLuhan et al, director Woody Allen
The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. The neighbourhood is impoverished. I had once Richardson and Lawrence in my reach. Mrs Allen is dead. My house has lost Levet, a man who took interest in everything, and therefore ready at conversation. Mrs Williams is so weak that she can be a companion no longer. When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, except that Dr Brocklesby for a little keeps him at a distance. Dinner with a sick woman you may venture to suppose not much better than solitary. After dinner, what remains but to count the clock, and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect. Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this? Samuel Johnson
It goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, the brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, II ii
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! ibid. II ii 523 soliloquy
Your path is not one of merit. Bring the recurring desires of your mind to me, every time they emerge. They cannot shock me, for I willed them! Bring me your confusion, your fear, your craving, your anxiety, your inability to love the world, your hesitation to serve, your jealousy, all the deficiencies that defy your spiritual disciplines. Sri Sathya Sai Baba
Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left. Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we’re all so bummed out. ibid.
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. Dr Sterling was right about that. I loved it because I thought it was all I had. I thought depression was the part of my character that made me worthwhile. I thought so little of myself, felt that I had such scant offerings to give to the world, that the one thing that justified my existence at all was my agony. ibid.
Why does the rest of the world put up with the hypocrisy, the need to put a happy face on sorrow, the need to keep on keeping on? ... I don’t know the answer, I know only that I can’t. I don’t want any more vicissitudes, I don’t want any more of this try, try again stuff. I just want out. I’ve had it. I am so tired. I am twenty and I am already exhausted. ibid.
I cry a lot. My emotions are very close to my surface. I don’t want to hold anything in so it festers and turns into pus – a pustule of emotion that explodes into a festering cesspool of depression. Nicolas Cage
Depression is nourished by a lifetime of ungrieved and unforgiving hurts. Penelope Sweet
Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent. It is plain and simple reduction of feeling ... People who keep stiff upper lips find that it’s damn hard to smile. Judith Guest
Depression is the inability to construct a future. Rollo May
This is my depressed stance. When you’re depressed, it makes a lot of difference how you stand. The worst thing you can do is straighten up and hold your head high because then you’ll start to feel better. If you’re going to get any joy out of being depressed, you've got to stand like this. Charlie Brown
In the 1950s depression was a strictly private affair. Those that sought help got little in return. The few drugs that were on offer were unlikely to lift your spirits. It all changed when a new wave of drugs came along. Scientists had realised that a brain chemical Serotonin affects our mood. Horizon: Pill Poppers, BBC 2010
In time the tide began to turn against SSRIs. As more and more people took them some disturbing serious side-effects began to emerge. ibid.
5One drug in particular came under scrutiny. In 2006 GSK, the makers of Seroxat, one of these SSRIs, admitted that Seroxat raised the risk of suicide eight times. ibid.
It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. Sylvia Plath
I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
What people don’t understand about depression is how much it hurts. It’s like your brain is convinced that it’s dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you’re worthless, and then there’s no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much. Tyler Hamilton
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You’re frightened, and you’re frightening, and you’re ‘not at all like yourself but will be soon’, but you know you won’t. Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top. John Keats
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V. Virginia Woolf
This fall I think you’re riding for – it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: ‘Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?’
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw. Charles Bukowski