“Depression is a mood disorder that causes a persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest.”
Mayo Clinic
“How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
“I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.”
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
“I have a suspicion that society, in its heart of hearts, despises depressives because it knows they have a point: the recognition that life is finite and sad and frightening.”
Tim Lott, The Guardian
“If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.”
Stephen Fry
“It’s so difficult to describe depression to someone who’s never been there, because it’s not sadness. I know sadness. Sadness is to cry and to feel. But it’s cold absence of feeling – that really hollowed-out feeling.”
J K Rowling
“In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression. I loved it because 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 was my pain.”
Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
“Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the grey drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain … it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.”
William Styron, Darkness Visible
