You’re fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one. Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. Ursula K Le Guin
I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action. Philip Larkin
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. Leo Tolstoy
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief,
In word, or sigh, or tear. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat. Christopher Hitchens
Since I was sixteen I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression. Amy Winehouse
In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient. James Hillman
I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse. Leonard Cohen
The term clinical depression finds its way into too many conversations these days. One has a sense that a catastrophe has occurred in the psychic landscape. Leonard Cohen
This high-flyer [Churchill] had a secret: he was sometimes gripped by dark moods of introspection and periods of melancholy he couldn’t shake off. Altered Statesmen: Winston Churchill, Discovery 2005
He [Churchill] had multiple problems. Certainly one of them that haunted him throughout his life was a tendency to recurrent depression. What he called his Black Dog. Jerrold Post, author When Illness Strikes the Leader
We thank thee, oh God, for depression
To guide us through our latter daze
We thank thee for opening our eyes
Helping us see through the Mormon haze. Bob McCue
For the last month he had forgotten he was ill ... As he walked homewards after being paid, feeling unutterably depressed and weary, he began once more to think of the future; and the more he thought of it the more dreadful it appeared. Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist
Usually after one of these arguments, Owen would wander off by himself, with his head throbbing and a feeling of unutterable depression and misery at his heart; weighed down by a growing conviction of the hopelessness of everything, of the folly of expecting that his fellow workmen would ever be willing to try to understand for themselves the causes that produced their sufferings. It was not that those causes were so obscure that it required exceptional intelligence to perceive them. ibid.
What’s the matter with being a loner and innovative? Isn’t that fine? But the [love genius] has the same wishes as other people. If he were back in high school doing science projects, fine. But if he’s too isolated and he’s disappointed in something big, it’s frightening, and fright can precipitate depression. Paul Howard, McLean Hospital
One million children under-18 take anti-depressants. Amy Goodman, Big Bucks, Big Pharma, news report
After a week I secretly returned to England to this hospital and to a doctor telling me I am bipolar. Stephen Fry, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, BBC 2006
Four million others in the UK have it. And many of the seriously ill end up killing themselves. ibid.
The poster-child of manic depression – I’m visiting my old friend Carrie Fisher … She’s on the edge of sanity. ibid.
There is no brain test that can diagnose polarity … There is no clear-cut test to show if someone is bipolar. ibid.
I’m sure it does help me to succeed. ibid.
… ‘Waited for a lorry to come along and then walked in front of it …’ ibid. sufferer
Manic depression is an illness that’s always handed down in families. ibid.
Despite it being the greatest killer of all – psychiatric illnesses – many of those suffering from it if given the chance don’t want to get rid of it. ibid.
I would have killed myself if I didn’t have the option of disappearing. Stephen Fry, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive II
Lithium: that’s the standard medication seven out of ten of those with manic depression are advised to take. ibid.
ECT – Electro Convulsive Therapy – is actually still used in the treatment of manic depression. ibid.
If you know someone who’s depressed, please resolve never to ask them why. Depression isn’t a straightforward response to a bad situation; depression just is, like the weather.
Try to understand the blackness, lethargy, hopelessness, and loneliness they’re going through. Be there for them when they come through the other side. It’s hard to be a friend to someone who’s depressed, but it is one of the kindest, noblest, and best things you will ever do. Stephen Fry
What if the way we understand the world is wrong. What if it’s not politicians and world events that shape our lives but business deals? Deals made in secret high up in the boardroom or over a drink in a car in the dead of night. Our every waking hour has been transformed by these deals, re-programming us to think and behave in a different way. This is the story of these deals. Who made them, why, and what do they mean for our future. Jacques Peretti, Billion Dollar Deals and How They Changed Your Health I, BBC 2017
It was a business plan, a strategy, to make living itself an illness, and patients of every one of us. ibid.
Psychiatrists needed to demonstrate the effectiveness of their practice. But the range of new conditions SMIII offered and the check-list approach to diagnosing them also allowed pharmaceutics companies to create niches for the development of a whole host of new medications which were then relentlessly marketed. ibid.
Deal Two: ‘The higher you score, the more likely you’ll be prescribed an anti-depressant.’ ibid.
Depression rates are known to be higher in deprived areas. ibid.
Many of the pharmaceutical companies marketing ADHD drugs have at one time or another referred to the research of one child psychiatrist prominent in this field. ibid.
Just Grief painting pictures in her brain. Side Effects 2013 starring Jude Law & Rooney Mara & Catherine Zeta-Jones & Channing Tatum & Vinessa Shaw & Ann Dowd & Polly Draper & David Costible & Mamie Gummer & Scott Shepherd et al, director Steven Soderbergh, Banks
Everyone takes them … It just makes it easier for you to be who you are. ibid.
It’s like there’s this poisonous fog bank rolling in on my mind and I’m paralysed. ibid. Emily to Banks with Martin
She kills people in her sleep too. ibid. Banks
Do you ever get the feeling you’re dead? Like some dog lying in the street that’s been hit by a car and left there to rot. Like I don’t know why I bother getting up in the morning. Panic 2000 starring William H Macy & John Ritter & Neve Campbell & Donald Sutherland & Tracey Ullman & Barbara Bain & David Dorfman & Tina Lifford & Bix Barnaba & Nicholle Tom & Andrea Baker et al, director Henry Bromell, Alex
One in every ten Americans are on anti-depressants. Prescription Thugs, Netflix 2015
In 2019 a pioneering drugs trial began. A radical new treatment for depression. A significant number of sufferers report no benefit from anti-depressants. Now a team of British researchers are convinced psychedelics could be the answer. The Psychedelic Drug Trial, BBC 2021
They were a new generation of antidepressants hailed as the latest wonder drugs. Now one in seven of us is taking an antidepressant. But only now decades after their launch is a different story being told. How a patient’ movement revealed what some drug companies tried to ignore. Many say they have been helped by antidepressants but for those who have been harmed by them, it’s been a struggle to be heard. Panorama: The Antidepressant Story, BBC 2023
During the 1990s these new antidepressant became global blockbusters … The drugs made millions worldwide. ibid.
This new generation of drugs were the SSRI antidepressants. ibid.
‘Now people accept that a small minority of people will have significant difficulty stopping antidepressants.’ ibid. Professor Taylor