Anna Mehler Paperny > Quotes

“Sometimes because, as hideous as this sounds to say, being loved is a necessary prerequisite for wanting to live but it is not sufficient on its own.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I’ve never been subject to anything awful enough to warrant this mind-swallowing badness. I have a supportive, loving family, had a happy childhood. I’m a very fortunate person. Only problem is, I hate myself and want to die.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“No one wants this crap illness that masquerades as personal failing. I had no desire to plumb its depths. The struggle to function leaves me little capacity to do so. But in the end I had no choice. I approached this enemy I barely believed in the only way I knew how: as a reporter. I took a topic about which I knew nothing and sought somehow to know everything. I talked to people in search of answers and mostly found more questions.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Suicidality and curiosity are anathema to each other: You can’t want to know things if you want to die. As long as I had questions I had reason to live, and when I was overwhelmed by a desire for death I could not begin to do the curious work that made life worth living.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“One of the first things mental health practitioners tell you after you try to die is that your recent attempt is not selfish, not a misery you’ve inflicted on those you love most, but a fatal final symptom of a disease that’s destroying you. Which, sure. Fine. But seeing my younger brother’s face in that psych ward after he’d flown in from his first weeks of law school convinced me I deserved to die in the most torturous way imaginable. Loving people so much it hurts doesn’t necessarily negate the need to die; it just makes you hate yourself more for all the pain you cause, makes you feel your death would be a gift.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“In other words, the earlier your depression starts, the longer it lasts and the longer you wait to start treatment, the longer it will take for treatment to work and the more treatment combinations you’ll need to try before something works. The longer your depression lasts and the more steps it takes for you to find something that works, the more likely it is you’ll relapse in a year and end up right back where you started. The longer and deeper and more frequent your depressive episodes, the more likely they are to keep coming back as your habit-loving brain starts to think this is normal.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Chronic illness changes the way you see yourself—it outlasts jobs, homes, relationships. Even the flimsiest reification has power.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“For millennia, we’ve recognized the difference between “normal” sadness and crippling despair. But we’ve never been good at delineating between the two. So the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) defines depression by a list of symptoms rather than how it’s caused.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I couldn’t believe my problem was extrinsic. I wanted to die because I was an idiot and could never improve, never move forward or do better—not because I was sick and therefore locked in a skewed perception of the world and myself within it. It’s not just me. Again and again, people I’ve spoken to bring up their sense of isolation, that theirs is a personal flaw unique to themselves, not something faced by others, certainly not something fixable. Debilitation—that inability to get out of bed, to interact with people—fuels self-revulsion. I loathed myself for the endless stasis, projects unrealized and opportunities ungrasped. I felt I was expending all my energy on the most basic level of functioning and had nothing to show for it—just years of going through the motions. And the worse I felt, the less motivated I was to pursue treatments that felt ineffectual.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Mental illness is expert at compounding existing marginalizations—taking aspects of your life that make you vulnerable and using them to screw you further.
So it is with race. Not being white can make you not only less likely to get in the door to get care but less likely to get good care and less likely to stick around long enough for that care to work.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“He signed me out and took me wandering through hospital hallways as I hyena-laughed uncontrollably, so stupid-glad to be with someone I loved who wasn't running away despite all available evidence and common sense and instinctive self-preservation advising the contrary.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“There were some people that were in shock to think you could study the biology of suicide. They were viscerally against it...They [would say] it's reductionistic to think that suicide is something happening in the brain. They think that it's social. But the issue is that it's not one or the other. If you are very sad, to the point that you can't see any way out, so that you're so severely hopeless that everything in reality changes from how it was before, it is in your brain...We don't know exactly where it's broken, but we know it's broken.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Trying to die or harming yourself without dying is also financially unwise. Many policies exclude self-inflicted injuries, so if you need income replacement or care that isn't covered by the public system, you're out of luck. If you want to try to get it covered, you'd have to prove not only that the self-inflicted injury is the product of mental illness but that there wasn't really intent—that you didn't know what you were doing.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I was irrationally worried that someone from work would see me and call me out for not really being sick.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“As much as I wind my mind back in time I'm unable to locate the start of a downward spiral.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“...you feel he should know and because in the vacuum of a botched attempt at death you crave even the rotest response.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Even Jasmin's dad, who never judged, who wanted to help, who wanted to convince his daughter her life was worth living, made things tougher sometimes. "There were times when he was like, 'You need to be stronger than this.' He never told me to snap out of it, but he's like, 'You have a lot going for yourself.' That's not a really good thing to tell someone who has a mental illness. But he didn't understand that at the time.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Spent years teaching English in Korea, backpacking across Southeast Asia." I was trying to get away from my problems but I just brought my problems with me. Kind of like wherever you go, there you are.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“On top of everything else, you need to learn to make a fuss. If you don't, no matter how your care's paid for—private insurance, public insurance, out of pocket—you may get passed over or rushed through when you need something more. If my parents hadn't pushed for a second opinion that, frankly, I didn't want, I'd have been discharged post-suicide attempt with negligible follow-up. Being pushy takes determination and time and a degree of confidence in the system and your place in it. People who are marginalized in other aspects of their lives—by race, by income, by language, by immigration status— are less likely to have that confidence.
And the people least able to haggle effectively are those with the most severe mental illness—either because they lack the wherewithal to do so or they don't think anything will make them better or they simply don't believe they deserve care. Or because their haggling isn't effective—it's easy to dismiss a crazy person's kvetching no matter how justified. I've spoken to so many people who felt they weren't heard, weren't listened to when making concerns known.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Reading books about depression helped her feel informed, but also terrified.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“You can have an awful doctor in any sphere and it can fuck with your trust for life. Surgery sucks. Intubation is awful. Chemotherapy is harrowing. But why is mental illness the only sphere of medicine characterized by a deep mistrust of caregivers and caregivers' profession? Cancer foundations are multibillion-dollar industries yet it's depression—the world's leading cause of years lost to disability, which boasts no Ice Bucket Challenge or money-making marathon, which gets fewer public dollars, and whose practitioners make less than the average medical specialist—that's derided as a marketing-driven capitalist fiction.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I think there's a kind of social responsibility to being open and public insofar as you are able to be, and different people are able to be to different degrees. I live in a city, occupy a context and work in a field where I wasn't going to lose a lot of credit because I had been depressed. So I felt like I had less to lose than other people would. If I weren't going to talk about it, then who would?”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Anxiety, for example, can be either a symptom of depression or another illness altogether. The two frequently coexist. One distinguishing factor I learned while navigating my own neuroses is the nature of the worry: people with anxiety disorder tend to freak out about the future—what they want to do, what they’re going to do, the infinite ways they could conceivably screw it up. If you’re depressed, there isn’t much of a future to worry about. People with depression-flavoured anxiety suffer crippling worry about the past, not despite our inability to change it but because of that. We ruminate endlessly about shit we did this morning or yesterday or last week or last year and how unforgivable it was and how everyone judged and continues to judge us and maybe we should ask them about it or no that would make it worse and what are all the possible ways they could have been upset about it and who are all the people they probably told? Angsty, ruminating moose.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“We talked about my return to work as though it were a real, imminent thing, not a delusional fantasy.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Depression affects everyone on the planet, directly or indirectly, in every possible sphere. its very ubiquity robs it of sexiness but not urgency.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“And while health insurance may enable better access to depression care, it does not ensure better care.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Physicians and epidemiologists have been trying to uncover suicide risk factors: characteristics outside existing disorders that make people more likely to try to kill themselves. Hopelessness; an "over-general" memory that skips over specific details; hyper-perfectionism; trouble solving problems; and a tendency toward black-and-white or all-or-nothing thinking are among them. Hopelessness certainly resonates for me: Beyond sadness, self-loathing, or any other negative emotional state, an absence of hope can be the most decisive thing propelling me to seek death.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“It's a redemptive story even if she knows it isn't over. Remission isn't the same as cure. Recovery doesn't preclude relapse. But "I'm not ashamed of it anymore...I wanted other people to realize they're not crazy, either.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“You think the people who would kill themselves would be the lonely people, who don't have any money, don't have anything to live for. My brother had everything.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Do it!" my mom urged. "You're going to be a live a long time!" At that moment, in my mind, that cheery prognosis became a threat, a trap, a heavy door clanging shut. I wanted to scream and run away, evade my own powerlessness.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person