good quotes of explanation

Excerpts from Darkness Visible by William Styron - about his struggle with depression. (Don't read it - the book itself sucks)

Depression... remains nearly incomprehensible to those who have not experienced it in its extreme mode, although the gloom, the "blues" which people go through occasionally and associate with the general hassle of everyday existence are of such prevalence that they do give many individuals a hint of the illness in its catastrophic form.

And one of the most unendurable aspects of such an interlude was the inability to sleep... the disruption of normal sleep patterns is a notoriously devastating feature of depression...

I felt a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility--as if my body had actually become frail, hypersensitive and somehow disjointed and clumsy, lacking normal coordiation. And soon I was in the throes of pervasive hypochondria. Nothing felt quite right with my corporeal self...

The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk. Soon evident are the slowed-down responses... ultimately, the body is affected and feels sapped, drained.

Many people lose all appetite; mine was relatively normal, but I found myself eating only for subsistence: food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.

Death by heart attack seemed particularly inviting, absolving me as it would of active responsibility.

...the sufferer from depression... finds himself, like a walking casualty... thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship.