Anna Mehler Paperny Quotes

“Crappy as we are at figuring out who has killed themselves, we're far worse at figuring out who's in danger of doing so.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I felt more scared not asking the question than asking the question.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“My bias favors compassionate bluntness: Have you been thinking about killing yourself? And, if the answer to that one is negative: Have you wanted to die at all in the past X days/weeks?
Yes, it's uncomfortable to discuss. But the stakes are too high not to.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“There are times when wanting your own death is seen not as pathological but as a rational decision, a choice to which you are entitled. It's telling, though, that the kinds of pain North American society acknowledges as so unbearable as to make death an acceptable choice don't include the pain caused by mental illness. In Canada and in some US states, a doctor can legally help you die if you have terminal cancer, but not if a mental illness is wrecking your life. That could change—there will likely be court challenges of the mental illness prohibition on medically assisted death—but a proper discussion of what that might look like, of how a doctor would distinguish between a desire to die driven by a disorder's skewed thinking and a desire to die driven by a rational assessment of what a disorder is doing to your life, is beyond the scope of this book. It is no doubt a question society will have to answer: Why does the pain of people who are crazy carry less weight than the pain of those who are not?”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“People refer to the "Werther effect," after Goethe's eighteenth-century novel The Sorrows of Young Werther in which the protagonist kills himself—and which, supposedly, gave rise to a slew of copycat suicides across Europe. Even academic researchers have had to confront ethics boards who have freaked out at the thought of talking to suicidal people about their suicidal thoughts for fear that would result in lots of suicides.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Even if they never used it, they feel more empowered. Just like you might feel better having an insurance policy even if you never use it.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“No one likes to admit they make treatment decisions about an individual based on the needs of someone else.”
― 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

“A disease is a kind of suffering that deserves social resources, and social resources can include research, drugs, compassion, money. Is depression a legitimate disease by that definition? Absolutely.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“One thing I've heard (and seen) over and over is how much deeper an understanding people have of mental illness once they've gone through it themselves (directly or indirectly via someone they love). Any experience cuts closer when you know it firsthand. It follows that health practitioners care better for depressed and suicidal people if they've been there. But imagine if the only competent oncologists were ones in remission for cancer; if the only decent obstetricians were ones who'd given birth; if only the superannuated could be geriatricians and a neurosurgery prerequisite was having had someone slice into their own brain. Surely the very starting point for trained clinicians in a "caring profession" is basic human empathy—and learning! And putting learning into practice!—to be able to provide adequate, evidence-based mental health care and not be insensitive assholes about it.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“But people don't seek treatment they don't trust.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Depression is a genuine and genuinely awful condition; we just don't understand it. Drugs, psychotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation, exercise, all work on some people to some degree. Depression's treatment toolbox remains inadequate. Coercing people into getting care is crappy no matter how necessary it is (and people will always disagree as to what justifies that suspension of basic liberty; this is why recourse is important). What this means is that failing to address psychiatry's credibility problem means people will go untreated or undertreated or die.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“He became lethargic, lost energy. Fixated on a growing list of his own shortcomings, things he needed to fix within himself to make everything better. Learned to cope with a subsuming sense of worthlessness by retreating into mental haze.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Chronic mental illnesses mess with both the way you perceive your world and your ability to recall it later.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“All I have to," Patrick told himself over the course of decades, "is solve this endless list of things and then everything will be better. You very much tend to blame yourself for all these symptoms. You feel you're worthless. Yeah, it kind of sucked. But it was just my daily life. I still managed to do things, but I didn't do very well. I didn't really talk to anyone, didn't do well socially, didn't date. Just trying to get through the day. It was a slog, basically. It was a huge slog.”
― 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

“And that's the greatest fear, right? That disclosure will turn against you. That my literary exercise could be responsible, even indirectly, for the anguish or, god forbid, suicide deaths of other human beings.”
― 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

“And I think that, a lot of the time, people who are depressed devote so much energy to secrecy that could be better devoted to getting better.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I give them advice within the limits of my ability to give advice...I don't want anyone who feels abandoned by and disconnected from the world to get another experience of abandonment from me. So even when they're people who don't particularly stir my sympathies, I always try to deal with them as kindly as I can and to say as much as I can about helping them.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Most days I work, and it feels good—like I'm building ground beneath my feet even as I struggle to keep from plummeting.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I couldn't tell you if I'm any better off than I was the September of my first suicide attempt. I know I've gone through periods, some quite recent, where I was worse. But work on this project gave me something to cling to and build on. It was validating. Almost every interview I did reinforced that this shit sandwich of an illness is genuine and genuinely awful and affects many, many more people than me. Those were days that made it seem worth plugging away.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“There is no happy ending. It's an uncomfortably personal exploration of a sickeningly common illness no one likes talking about, one that remains undertreated and poorly treated and grossly inequitably treated in part because of our own squeamishness in confronting it or our own denial of its existence as an illness and the destruction it wreaks when left to its own devices.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“So let's fix this, goddammit, and move on to bitching about something else.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“Thank you. You give me reasons to wake up in the morning.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“I owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to Louise Dennys, the brilliant powerhouse who brought this beast into being.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“You were among the first to believe in this thing.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“To José Silveira, who teaches me to make life worth living and who, let's face it, puts up with a lot.
To Omar El Akkad, the human being I want to be.
To Brendan Kennedy, who keeps saving my life.
To Richard Warnica, who makes me keep chasing.
To Allison Martell, who inspires me.
To Leslie Young, who keeps me grounded.
To Amran Abocar, who makes a day job possible.
To Jennifer Griffiths, a visual wizard.
To Heather Cromarty, a true ally.
And to Liana Willis and Hana El Niwairi, who helped make this a reality.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“And, above all, to my parents, Audrey Mehler and David Paperny, who support me when I need it most and want it least, who teach me resilience through unconditional love and appropriate jokes.
Thank you.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person

“She writes with a stunning fluency.”
― Anna Mehler Paperny, Hello I Want to Die Please Fix Me: Depression in the First Person