Jonathan Franzen Quotes

If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.

Since I was 16, I've felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was barely out of my teens. Like our olive skin tone and caterpillar eyebrows, I guess it just runs in the family.

I'd been depressed before, of course. But I'm talking about really depressed. Not just feeling a bit down or sad, a depression that has something to do with biorhythms. I'm talking about the kind of depressed that floats in upon you like a fog. You can feel it coming and you can see where it is going to take you but you are powerless, utterly powerless to stop it. I know now.

If you are burdened with depressing feelings of guilt or disappointment, of failure or shame, there is a cure.

I realized that I had a serious problem with depression, and I went to a doctor and he gave me some medication.

I didn't know I was depressed until years later. Actually, I went to the Minirth-Meier Clinic for ADD. I got tested for ADD. So, that's nice. It's nice to know you got ADD. So, that puts you on medication. Did that for years. Then got tested for clinical depression. So, finally when they tell you this, you go, 'ahhh, this is great.' So, now this explains events in your life and how you handle them. But our society frowns on it and they don't want their heroes to have these issues, but unfortunately I do.

still, what could i say? that i didn't just feel depressed - instead, it was like the depression was the core of me, of every part of me, from my mind to my bones? that if he got blue, i got black? that i hated those pills so much, because i knew how much i relied on them to live?

I have got so low that I have asked to be hospitalized and for deep narcosis (sleep). I cannot stand being awake. The pain is too much... Something has happened to me, this vital spark has stopped burning - I go to a dinner table now and I don't say a word, just sit there like a dodo. Normally I am the centre of attention, keeps the conversation going, - so that is depressing in itself. It's like another person taking over, very strange. The most important thing I say is 'good evening' and then I go quiet.

When you're unhappy, I guess everything in the world - reading, eating, sleeping - has something buried somewhere inside it that just makes you unhappier.

I believe that whatever doesn't kill you, simply makes you... stranger.

I was in a very dark place for a long time. It's just so hard to have normalcy.

Don't they give you happy pills in this place?

I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.

I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling.

Does it depress you? To know just how alone you really are?

Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

It's very important to distinguish between chemical depression that requires medication and talk therapy.

Whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 per cent from the curative power of medicines.

That's what happens if you don't address the darkness in you. You become repressed and depressed and suicidal.

Although one is not inclined to be timid or nervous, it is nevertheless a trifle depressing to receive letters full of expostulation and entreaty: 'If you are determined to commit suicide, why not come home and do so in a quiet lady-like manner?'

I'm not always depressed: only when I think and feel.

He wondered if this was what clinical depression felt like, a total numbness, a weary lack of hope.

You can feel nothing but a torment, and believe nothing but a lie. You will not raise your head to look at all the miracles of life that surround you; but you will run ten miles to see a fight or a death.