Matthew

“Is it depression when I think how I would prefer to go where they have gone, and to stop the maniacal struggle of staying alive? Or is it just a part of life, to keep living in all the ways we cannot stand?”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression

“I guess being depressed all the time was actually a relatively safe place to be. I didn’t have the real-world worries that everyone else has because I knew that I simply couldn’t function well enough to take care of myself. What do I do now? Trying to break the habits of years of depression is what I’m doing for the moment with my doctor.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

“Therapy allows a person to make sense of the new self he has attained on medication, and to accept the loss of self that occurred during a breakdown. You need to be reborn after a severe episode, and you need to learn the behaviors that may protect against relapse. You need to run your life differently from how you ran it before.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon

“The monolithic problem of depression cannot be expressed with a monolithic response; depressions are contextual and must be interpreted within the contexts in which they occur.”
― Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression