The Noonday Demon

“We require at all times a certain quantity of care or sorrow or want, as a ship requires ballast, to keep on a straight course.”

successful relationships are usually partnerships in which power can be passed back

“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.”

“Depression these days is curable,” people told me. “You take antidepressants like people take aspirin for a headache.” This is not true. Depression these days is treatable; you take antidepressants like you take radiation for cancer. They sometimes do miraculous things, but none of it is easy and results are inconsistent.

They need to go together: by themselves pills are a weak poison, love a blunt knife, insight a rope that snaps under too much strain. With the lot of them, if you are lucky, you can save the tree from the vine.

Once the cortisol/stress correlation gets distorted, you can get hysterical about bananas; you will find that everything that happens to you is stressful. “And that is a form of depression, and then of course being depressed is itself stressful,” observes Young. “A downward spiral.”

“Medicines treat depression,” my therapist said to me. “I treat depressives.”

Part of what is most horrendous about depression, and particularly about anxiety and panic, is that it does not involve volition: feelings happen to you for absolutely no reason at all.

Eventually, you are simply absent from yourself.