Catherine Reitman Quotes

One in five women experience a mental health condition during pregnancy, or in the year after giving birth. It can affect any woman. And it can be devastating.

It's horrible, horrible, horrible. It took a year and a half until I found out that I had post-natal depression.

I want to tell people that I had post-natal depression because there is so much stigma around the subject and there shouldn't be.

When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.

There is enormous shame around depression of any kind and at any time. And there's enormous social stigma attached to it, which we need to go on fighting. But I think that the sense of depression during pregnancy and early motherhood has been particularly stigmatized, that people especially feel that should be the happiest time of your life.

I went back to work about six weeks after I gave birth, which was crazy early, and experienced some pretty bad postpartum depression but didn't know it at the time.

I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.

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.

A middle-aged woman who looked like someone's cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face... It didn't add up. Suicide wasn't invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool.

You have good days and bad days, and depression's something that, you know, is always with you.

I'm really quite bipolar, and the depressed times, when everything felt like night, sometimes you get to such a low point that you physically beat at it until it bleeds - as you would say - bleeds till sunshine. You get to a point where you say, 'I will not take it anymore! I'm gonna do something drastic if I stay this depressed. I've got to break out of there!'

Depression doesn't take away your talents - it just makes them harder to find.

Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.

I'm glad that I never ended up killing myself, though I came close more times than I would like to admit.

My doctor says, 'You've got one of the hardest ones to treat because it's not bipolar, it's not up and down, you're always just about a quart low in the mood department.

People don't know how to talk about being depressed - that it's totally okay to feel sad.

One of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages, and eat lunch, and organise themselves to take a shower and go out the front door, and that it's not a big deal. And yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it.

Well, you know, there's depression and depression. What I mean by depression in my own case is that depression isn't just the blues. It's not just like I have a hangover in the weekend ... the girl didn't show up or something like that. It isn't that. It's not really depression, it's a kind of mental violence which stops you from functioning properly from one moment to the next. You lose something somewhere and suddenly you're gripped by a kind of angst of the heart and of the spirit.

When you're depressed, you know, it's like the world has ended. Even getting out of bed takes the most massive amount of effort. But when you're manic, oh, it's so addicting. You know, I have finished novels in two weeks in manic stages.

(Cartoon caption:) I never really rallied after the birth of my first child.

Depression is a real demon in the woods for a lot of creative people, you know? It's part of what the documentary is trying to be about for me, finding balance, where the beauty that is attainable in the creative arts can be matched with the scratchy roughness of regular life.

Depression manifests itself in a lack of will.

Depression - that limp word for the storm of black panic and half-demented malfunction - had over the years worked itself out in Charlotte's life in a curious pattern. Its onset was often imperceptible: like an assiduous housekeeper locking up a rambling mansion, it noiselessly went about and turned off, one by one, the mind's thousand small accesses to pleasure.

Depression is the most unpleasant thing I have ever experienced. . . . It is that absence of being able to envisage that you will ever be cheerful again. The absence of hope. That very deadened feeling, which is so very different from feeling sad. Sad hurts but it's a healthy feeling. It is a necessary thing to feel. Depression is very different.

It's interesting to watch people go through it in something like this. I mean, what other then Melancholia films do they portray depression in?