October 28, 2017

How Depression Feels

"What does mental illness actually look like and feel like? How is depression different from just feeling sad or discouraged or blue? I'm not the only one, certainly, to try to describe it. In his award-winning book Darkness Visible, William Styron writes:

'The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come - not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying - or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity - but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.' "

Darkness Is My Only Companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight, pg 39

"Depression meant that every breath, every thought, every moment of consciousness ached, throbbed, stung."

Darkness Is My Only Companion - Kathryn Greene-McCreight, pg 55

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