Quotes on Depression:

When Val first came to see me she was frozen in her depression, barely able to move or speak. Eventually she did decide to treat herself more kindly, but she had many more betrayals to endure before she said, 'Enough is enough,; -Dorothy Rowe, the way out of your prison"

People in the middle of depression are beings who have to live, for a while, without a story, which is why it feels as though you've lost your soul. But this period is a dark room where you're developing the next chapter of your life before living it. The work will be all the more vivid if you're patient and let it take it's own course.' -Gwyneth Lewis

'The crucial thing is not to listen to your mind. What's going on in there is: 'Shit! I'm in a trouble, I knew it would always come to this, there's nowhere to go, no rest. This is terrible. They're bound to sack me, if only I hadn't...Why can't I get up?Get up! I can't. I must get up and climb a mountain then bake a cake then go to the gym, that would show them I'm OK. Everyone else is fine; it's only me who's mad. I've lost it. This is the end of me. Oh my God, I can't bear this...
Your best bet is to keep very close to the ground, don't raise your head an inch into the wind. Expose yourself to this onslaught and you're lost, even though it is your own mind that has created this gale, what Les Murray calls a 'head-storm'. Stay still and even these enormous, terrifying powers will pass.' -Gwyneth Lewis.

“Now when I glimpse depression shuffling in the wings, waiting to come on, I have tricks up my sleeve to forestall it. I think, for instance, of optical illusions. That box, drawn on paper, that seems to project its closed end towards you but, at a shifting of the mind's gears, becomes suddenly open, hollow, so that you can look inside. Those pencilled lines of identical length, one with arrows at its ends pointing outwards, the other with arrows pointing inwards, the first seeming half as long again as it's apparently shrunken twin. Marks on paper that serve as reminders of some possibility of control over reality, if only in the mind's eye.'

'I have other remedies, too. I no longer allow the blanket to fall without a struggle- instead, I force myself to track that fall to it's source. The mind veers away, reluctant to reveal the awesome pettiness, the huge egoism that often sparks mild depression, the bloated baby that screams in all of us and blackens our horizons with it's bawling for attention. Once the baby is discovered though, the blackness lifts. “