I never thought getting older would be so great. But when it comes to depression, I have experienced less the older I’ve gotten.
Massage therapy has been shown to relieve depression, especially in people who have chronic fatigue syndrome other studies also suggest benefit for other populations.
Each person’s drive to overwork is unique, and doing too much numbs every workaholic’s emotions differently. Sometimes overwork numbs depression, sometimes anger, sometimes envy, sometimes sexuality. Or the overworker runs herself ragged in a race for attention.
As we learned after President Herbert Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff at the outset of the Great Depression, vibrant international trade is a key component to economic recovery hindering trade is a recipe for disaster.
As for despair, it comes about when I have been a fool and hate myself and despair of my personality. I am prone to gloom, but not depression as such.
I’m really clear about what my life mission is now. There’s no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I’ve returned to the athlete I once was. I’m integrating all the parts of me – jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher – and becoming stronger as a result.
You largely constructed your depression. It wasn’t given to you. Therefore, you can deconstruct it.
I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which isn’t that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.
Since I was 16, I’ve felt a black cloud hangs over me. Since then, I have taken pills for depression.
I was born during the Depression in a little community just outside Waco, and I grew up listening to Franklin Roosevelt on the radio.
Bipolar disorder, manic depression, depression, black dog, whatever you want to call it, is inherent in our society. It’s a product of stress and in my case over-work.
Depression is something that doesn’t just go away. It’s just… there and you deal with it. It’s like… malaria or something. Maybe it won’t be cured, but you’ve got to take the medication you’re prescribed, and you stay out of situations that are going to trigger it.
I have my dark side like anybody, you know, depression, anxiety… and I write about gritty, real-life stuff.
We are having the single worst recovery the U.S. has had since the Great Depression. I don’t care how you measure it. The East Coast knows it. The West Coast knows it. North, South, old, young, everyone knows it’s the worst recovery since the Great Depression.
I learned that I suffered from bipolar II disorder, a less serious variant of bipolar I, which was once known as manic depression. The information was naturally frightening up to 1 in 5 people with bipolar disorder will commit suicide, and rates may even be higher for those suffering from bipolar II.
The depths of the Depression. You didn’t ask what the job was, what the pay was, you didn’t ask about stock options, or – you said yes.
The years of the economic depression have been years of political reaction, and that is why the economic crisis has generated a world peace crisis.
I always thought I was depressive, and I only recently realized that I have more of an anxiety disorder than chronic depression.
I have a master’s in psychology, and depression and anxiety are considered to be cyclical.
When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.
The little depression I experienced during my manic-depression was not like depression as anyone else had ever described it. It was very violent and angry, and I was full of rage. I wasn’t lying in bed.
Manic depression is a type of depression, technically, and it’s the opposite of uni-polar. Manic depression is also called bi-polar disorder. Some people don’t like to call it that because they think it makes it sound too nice, when the reality is if you have manic-depression you have manic-depression.
I felt like I was the only person on the planet with this ‘thing called depression’, and I remember being frightened. I was knocked out and dopey, and I cried all of the time.
After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression.
In total, I was diagnosed with depression by eight psychotherapists and psychiatrists over a period of thirteen years. Diagnosed wrong. Absolutely wrong. My accurate diagnosis was manic depression, or what we call bipolar disorder today.
My manic depression was ravaging my life, but because nobody could see it, many people thought it was a figment of my imagination.
If you had asked people in 1929, ‘Here is what is about to happen. How much would you pay to avoid the Great Depression from occurring?’ The answer is they would have paid a lot. They would have borrowed money if it could be used to prevent the Great Depression.
But if, if you take a look at what would have happened, I mean, do we need to see soup lines down the street to figure out what would have happened? We avoided – and all economists will tell you that millions of jobs were saved because of the Recovery Act, and we avoided a second Great Depression. That, that is a reality.
My father made false teeth. Unfortunately, during the Depression, not many people could afford them, and my parents lost their home.
It was the height of the Depression, and suddenly I am earning pots of money.
If you want to understand geology, study earthquakes. If you want to understand the economy, study the Depression.
I think one of the lessons of the Depression – and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated – was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.
Importantly, in the 1930s, in the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve, despite its mandate, was quite passive and, as a result, financial crisis became very severe, lasted essentially from 1929 to 1933.
The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode – an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background… For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest.
People saw the Depression as a necessary thing – a chance to squeeze out the excesses, get back to Puritan morality. That just made things worse.
During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again.
My parents, products of the Great Depression, were successful people, but lived in a state of constant fear that my sister and I, and they, would sink into the kind of economic insecurity that their generation knew so well.
During the Depression, my dad made radios to sell to make extra money. Nobody had any money to buy the radios, so he would trade them for dogs. He built kennels in the backyard, and he cared for the dogs.
I’ve battled with that type of stuff, but what I’ve found is that by doing stand-up, I’ve actually learned about depression and how to combat it. I don’t have clinical, but I’ve definitely had my bouts with it.
Compared to America or Europe, God isn’t a big part of our lives here. I don’t know anyone here who goes to church when he’s had a rough divorce or is going through depression. We go out into nature instead.
Once a week, I like to slip into a deep existential depression where I lose all my sense of oneness and self-worth.
The concept of the ‘good ol’ days’ must be one of our society’s biggest delusions, top reasons for depression, as well as most often used excuse for lack of success.
Every experience feeds an actor, and I’ve learned that depression is all around us.
The time when I had desire to go to the United States I didn’t have a penny. It was in the middle of the depression, you know. I couldn’t get as far as Hoboken at that time.
I felt very strongly the whole social impact of that depression, you know, and I felt very strongly about the efforts that this Resettlement Administration was trying to accomplish resettling people, helping them, and so on.
I don’t feel the depression the people who are always looking back to the ’50s, to ‘Father Knows Best’ feel. I can see the coming of another glorious era.
If you are feeling some December blues, or even depression, don’t fight it. Instead, do something for yourself. Be reflective. Let the emotions exist. And be encouraged that, like me, you can get to a better place, but it can take time.
In the United States in the 20th century, every major event that America was going through, there was a boxer who seemed to symbolically represent it, from slavery to the Vietnam War to the Depression – all the way along, you just seemed to have boxers that carried the narrative.
I suffered from post-natal depression after Rowan was born. I had a healthy, beautiful baby girl and I couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t hold her, smile at her. All I wanted was to disappear and die.
It’s like you asked me about the depression thing: you grope towards an understanding of whatever it is your going through, and it’s not personal, there are forces in play around you, and you seek to understand them and that way you can go on.
After Bush was elected in 2004 – please note that I didn’t say ‘re-elected’ – and I was walking around in my befuzzed state of confusion and low-grade depression, I set out more or systematically to read writers who’d grappled with that fundamental question of what America is, why it is the way it is.
I was born illegitimately and almost immediately, as I understand it, placed in an orphanage. So my very earliest memories were in an orphanage. It was the tag end of the Great Depression when I was born. People were desperately poor.
When you are clinically diagnosed with depression as a teenager, sometimes people don’t understand it. You feel like you should be happy, especially when you have a very lucky upbringing, and you blame yourself.
Even if consumer confidence hit rock bottom, that most likely would not be enough, by itself, to cause a depression.
I’ve had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.
Our Generation has had no Great war, no Great Depression. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.
I think there’s a danger, for me at least, in retreating and going inward and depression. I have to stay diligent against that tendency.
With ‘Seven Deadly Sins,’ there was a lot of personal stuff in there that I didn’t even realize I’d been carrying around for awhile. And a lot of guilt involved, a lot of emotion, a lot of depression. Once I was done writing that book, I was able to really let go of that stuff.
Thus, the use of fiat money is more justifiable in financing a depression than in financing a war.
I think people who suffer from depression, unless it’s post-traumatic, are probably going to struggle with it for their whole life.
When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.
Like most people, I woke up one day to find that everyone I knew was taking antidepressants, and since I wasn’t, I figured that I must be the cause of their depression.
Depression is close to me, but suicide hasn’t been.
Most of my friends are not actors. Most people have an idea of what an actor’s life is, and it’s pure glamour and excitement: it’s easy and free and everyone loves you. But with a certain level of fame, there’s a real level of paranoia and depression that comes with what you do, that nobody talks about.
Coffee is already known to be a preventive factor against mild depression, Parkinson’s disease, and colon and rectal cancers.
I often make movies that involve depression or deep holes of sadness, although there are also these other great things in ‘New Moon,’ like this epic set-piece at the end of the film in Italy.
The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.
Depression has been called the world’s number one public health problem. In fact, depression is so widespread it is considered the common cold of psychiatric disturbances. But there is a grim difference between depression and a cold. Depression can kill you.
Depression can seem worse than terminal cancer, because most cancer patients feel loved and they have hope and self-esteem.
Powerful new drug-free treatments have been developed for depression and for every conceivable type of anxiety, such as chronic worrying, shyness, public speaking anxiety, test anxiety, phobias, and panic attacks. The goal of the treatment is not just partial improvement but full recovery.
People talk about physical fitness, but mental health is equally important. I see people suffering, and their families feel a sense of shame about it, which doesn’t help. One needs support and understanding. I am now working on an initiative to create awareness about anxiety and depression and help people.
I have fought my own battle with depression, and it was important for me to bring a little awareness about it for others.
My parents have been very supportive, in fact, it was my mother who identified that what I was going through was actually depression. My family and friends never let me feel as if something was wrong with me. They made me feel that what I was going through was okay. They supported my decision to take medication for depression.
My brother and I laughed a lot as kids. We came up in the middle of the Depression, and neither one of us knew we were poor. We had nothing, but we didn’t know it.
Depression runs in my family on both sides, and I have to be wary.
Depression is when you have lots of love, but no one’s taking.
At times, I feel overwhelmed and my depression leads me into darkness.
Depression – it falls into that small category of things like combat that, if you haven’t been in it, you can say you can imagine it all you like. But it’s truly different.
The greatest benefit of depression is the fact that when I have talked about it, every so often someone comes up and says, ‘You saved my dad’s life.’
Stories come and go. The challenge is to frame the questions that voters will be asking on polling day, such as who has avoided a global depression and worked here to deliver jobs.
Kids in the entertainment industry are at a risk of developing depression, as they see glamour at an early age.
Broadcast radio was entering its own golden age during the Depression, with live programming on stations all through the day. Local stations needed singers, musicians, announcers, and whipcord personalities, along with Christian clergy to give prayers and pundits to speak on world affairs.
Bill Hewlett and I were brought up in the Depression. We weren’t interested in the idea of making any money. Our idea was if you couldn’t find a job, you’d make one for yourself.
Running a successful, growing company in Silicon Valley can create an ironic sort of depression and delusion. The better you’re doing, the higher the stakes, and higher expectations for you to win. Maybe that’s why people say it’s so hard. But that doesn’t make it hard. That just makes it distracting.
I wish I had never got manic depression. When I was in junior high, I didn’t know what was the matter with me. It was as if I’d died or something. Now that I go to a clinic and get the right kind of medicine, I am not as depressed as I used to be.
People don’t know I’ve got a deep social conscience. I’m a child of the Depression, born in 1933. My parents were very liberal in their social views.
The five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live with the one we lost. They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief.
When I diagnose my depression now, I think it was partially about saying goodbye to these kids that I always expected to have but already knew that I wouldn’t.
I start to think there really is no cure for depression, that happiness is an ongoing battle, and I wonder if it isn’t one I’ll have to fight for as long as I live. I wonder if it’s worth it.
Sometimes I think that I was forced to withdraw into depression because it was the only rightful protest I could throw in the face of a world that said it was alright for people to come and go as they please, that there were simply no real obligations left.
In a strange way, I had fallen in love with my depression.
That’s the thing about depression: A human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depression is so insidious, and it compounds daily, that it’s impossible to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage without a key.
America had been a boom-and-bust economy going into the Great Depression – just over and over and over, fortunes were wiped out, ordinary families were crushed under it.
In general, the more food we eat in its natural state – without additives – and the less it is refined, the healthier it will be for us. Food can affect the mind, and deficiencies of certain elements in the body can promote mental depression.
I have battled clinical depression and have come out of the other side. I’ve been free of it for many years now. Finding the place in my own mind and heart to win that battle without using medication, finding the place within myself where I could be alive again, that was one of the biggest challenges I’ve faced.
Researchers consistently find that most older volunteers, when compared to older nonvolunteers, have fewer functional and physical impairments, overall better health, higher life satisfaction and less depression. In addition, they attend religious services more frequently and belong to more social organizations.
In the Great Depression, employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial polices changed.
Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.
We live in a society bloated with data yet starved for wisdom. We’re connected 24/7, yet anxiety, fear, depression and loneliness is at an all-time high. We must course-correct.
Studies by many labs have already started to identify specific circuits of neurons involved in normal cognitive function like memory and learning, as well as disease processes such as Parkinson’s disease, depression, and autism.
Nationalization, unmentionable only yesterday, has entered common usage not least because an even scarier word – depression – is next on America’s list to avoid.
It’s a scary thing going into the workforce with a $50,000 debt and you’ve been trained as a classical theatre actor. There’s always a depression in the theatre.
But with the slow menace of a glacier, depression came on. No one had any measure of its progress no one had any plan for stopping it. Everyone tried to get out of its way.
If we can boondoggle ourselves out of this depression, that word is going to be enshrined in the hearts of the American people for years to come.
The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by the Chicken of Depression.
I went through a lot of changes and a period of depression. I’d reached an age when I had to grow up and start taking life a bit more seriously, which had a huge impact on me. I suffered terrible anxiety, and sometimes, in the middle of a game, my legs would start shaking uncontrollably. It was pretty scary.
Many of depression’s symptoms – exhaustion, insomnia, nausea, headaches, weight loss, weight gain – are physical ailments.
In order that people who suffer from depression seek treatment without a second thought, the stigmas must further fall until we reach a point in time when that person with leukemia and that person with depression both receive the same level of sympathy and the same level of rigorous treatment. Both people deserve it.
If the spectrum linking everyday depression to Major Depression sometimes hinders understanding of it, it also offers an opportunity for empathy. Because almost everyone, at some point, experiences feelings of sadness, of hopelessness, of emptiness, not to mention lethargy and irritability.
When I’m not working on something, I seem to go through periods of depression. It helps to keep busy.
My depression at the end of Wham! was because I was beginning to realise I was gay, not bi.
World War II made prosperous the United States, which had been undergoing a depression for a dozen years, and made very rich those magnates and their managers who govern the republic – with many a wink – in the people’s name.
By 1939, the Depression was back. Unemployment was huge. Roosevelt didn’t have any quick fix. Remember, the New Deal, Works Progress Administration, and Civilian Conservation Corps – all that happened years before. Roosevelt was riding a storm.
During the desperate depression of the 1980s, there were no oil and gas companies without net operating losses.
Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful.
Trust me, you know when you’ve got depression.
Here is the tragedy: when you are the victim of depression, not only do you feel utterly helpless and abandoned by the world, you also know that very few people can understand, or even begin to believe, that life can be this painful. There is nothing I can think of that is quite as isolating as this.
If depression has taught me one thing, it is this: what a rare and beautiful treasure is the simple human gift of joy. For me now, joy – our capacity to delight in one another and in the world – is the reason why we are here. It is as simple as that. And I feel compelled to spread the word.
My character had been in the chair for seven years. He had gone through his anger, depression, drug and alcohol abuse. He had gone through everything, now he was up, he was happy, he was filled with his dream.
We would go down to Riverside, California, which is very poor now, but that’s where my grandfather grew up. He grew up during the Depression in Riverside.
Until recently, we regarded love as supernatural. We were willing to study the brain chemistry of fear and depression and anger but not love.
To act wisely when the time for action comes, to wait patiently when it is time for repose, put man in accord with the tides. Ignorance of this law results in periods of unreasoning enthusiasm on the one hand, and depression on the other.
To combat the confusion and depression that assault me when I come off the road in the middle of a tour, I seek the most oblivionated music possible. When it’s the ‘way out there’ that I seek, I go right to my stash of amazing music from Japan.
There have been periods in my life where I have experienced depression. It has been through some of my darkest moments that I have written some of my best songs. For me, singing and writing is very therapeutic. It’s much more effective than taking Prozac!
I was born in Chicago in 1927, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. We lived in a nice apartment, always had enough to eat, and I had my own room. I never was aware of the Great Depression.
So people have been hurting and I understand that. And it doesn’t give them comfort or solace for me to tell them, you know, but for me, we would be in a worldwide depression.
There isn’t anybody out there who doesn’t have a mental health issue, whether it’s depression, anxiety, or how to cope with relationships. Having OCD is not an embarrassment anymore – for me. Just know that there is help and your life could be better if you go out and seek the help.
To my mind, the main reason for the Depression in the United States as a whole, is the bondage of debt and the spirit of speculation among the people.
Aim high and don’t sell yourself short. Know that you’re capable. Understand that a lot of people battle with a lot of things – depression, body image or whatever else – so know that it’s not just you. You’re not alone.
I used to love to create outfits, and I still do – I just don’t have the time. How can you wear one thing and never wear it again? Even my wedding dress – I had a dress made that I could wear again. I’m a child of the depression, so I’m very, very practical.
My mother was a big influence she was exceedingly chic, completely dressed in a completely different manner than I did. I was a child of the Depression, so she taught me all about accessories, and I always tell everybody she worships at the altar of the accessory.
There seem to be many causes of depression. One cause is profound loss, grief. Economic hardship we know is linked to depression. We don’t have a full picture.
I do a lot of research on the placebo effect, not just in depression but in irritable bowel syndrome, pain, arthritis of the knee, migraine, asthma.
I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.
As a young man, I lived through the Great Depression, when banks failed and so many lost their jobs and homes and went hungry. I was fortunate to have a job at a canning factory that paid 25 cents an hour.
In the five years since the end of the Great Recession, the economy has made considerable progress in recovering from the largest and most sustained loss of employment in the United States since the Great Depression.
When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.
You know, my Grandpop Finnegan used to have an expression: he used to say, ‘Joey, the guy in Olyphant’s out of work, it’s an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law’s out of work, it’s a recession. When you’re out of work, it’s a depression.’
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
When I was a deacon, the ominous signs of the Great Depression began to appear. Tens of thousands lost their jobs. Money was scarce. Families had to do without. Some young people did not ask their mothers, ‘What’s for dinner?’ because they knew all too well that their cupboards held very little.
In my experience, divorce takes you out for about 10 years, but you hear people talk about it lightly. The same with depression. You only have to have one good breakdown before you realize you need help. It’s pretty frightening.
Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.
Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.
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.
In the heart of the Great Depression, millions of American workers did something they’d never done before: they joined a union. Emboldened by the passage of the Wagner Act, which made collective bargaining easier, unions organized industries across the country, remaking the economy.
When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year I turned 50, it was certainly a shock. But as a journalist, knowing a little bit about a lot of things, I didn’t suffer the misconception that depression was all in my head or a mark of poor character. I knew it was a disease, and, like all diseases, was treatable.
I had had some months of depression. Not serious enough to keep me from work. So, I guess you’d call that a mild depression. It was becoming worse. And I was being treated for it with anti-depressants.
I had had some months of depression. Not serious enough to keep me from work. So, I guess you’d call that a mild depression.
It may feel like the more you know about depression and the many forms it can take, the more questions you have. That’s how I feel.
There’s the famous thing that the A&R man from the record company is supposed to do: He’s supposed to come into the studio and listen to the songs you’ve been recording and then say, ‘Guys, I don’t hear any singles.’ And then everybody falls into a terrible depression because you have to write one.
Art saved me it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
All behavioral or mood disorders – including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction – have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.
Every age yearns for a more beautiful world. The deeper the desperation and the depression about the confusing present, the more intense that yearning.
A lot of people don’t realize that depression is an illness. I don’t wish it on anyone, but if they would know how it feels, I swear they would think twice before they just shrug it.
Scientists have demonstrated that dramatic, positive changes can occur in our lives as a direct result of facing an extreme challenge – whether it’s coping with a serious illness, daring to quit smoking, or dealing with depression. Researchers call this ‘post-traumatic growth.’
We’re all well-acquainted with depression, we all know what the low moods are, but the mania was not something I knew much about. I didn’t know that it would make someone dress extravagantly or start to pun, and to stay up and drink.
Depression, if it’s an unconsciously elected experience, is a luxury.
The struggle these veterans face receiving adequate care for PTSD and depression is a tragedy that needs to be addressed, which is why I cosponsored the Clay Hunt SAV Act.
What you believe is very powerful. If you have toxic emotions of fear, guilt and depression, it is because you have wrong thinking, and you have wrong thinking because of wrong believing.
Recovering from the suicide of a loved one, you need all the help you can get, so I very much recommend a meditation program. The whole picture of how to recover from this has to do with body, mind, and spirit. That’s applicable to any kind of depression.
If I had not been already been meditating, I would certainly have had to start. I’ve treated my own depression for many years with exercise and meditation, and I’ve found that to be a tremendous help.
Being a typical Pisces, I might have experienced mood shifts, but I don’t remember any depression, or needing to do anything, or to have someone bring me out of being depressed.
There is nothing incompatible about laughter and demons, nor about athletic achievement and depression. Mike Flanagan made me laugh, too. But mostly, he made me brave.
The truth is that for those 86 long years when the Red Sox went without a World Series win, fans were not only in a recession, but trapped in a longstanding, deeply entrenched sports depression.
I have had issues with depression all my life, and it’s probably true to say there was a tendency towards it even when I was very young, during my schooldays. There was often – and this is quite common with comics – a sense of not feeling as if I belonged anywhere.
One Saturday in 1984, I walked into my first AA meeting. I went regularly for six years and only stopped when I came to realize my underlying problem was not genuine alcoholism, but depression.
I was a Depression kid, growing up in Oklahoma.
And I always think of life like a giant wave. You know, it rises and it crests and it flies, and it’s just magnificent, and then it crashes. And for a lot of people, when it crashes, that’s the end, and they go down the deep, dark hole of depression.
Depression, suffering and anger are all part of being human.
We had a booming stock market in 1929 and then went into the world’s greatest depression. We have a booming stock market in 1999. Will the bubble somehow burst, and then we enter depression? Well, some things are not different.
Aleta St. James is an internationally renowned energy healer, life coach, best selling author, and more. Aleta does private sessions to release old resistance and shift out of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, trauma, addictions, infertility, and insecurity at a cellular level.
We have had a great depression in agriculture, caused mainly by several seasons of bad harvests, and some of our traders have suffered much from a too rapid extension in prosperous years.
I think because I did a lot of modelling and appeared in lads mags a lot of women didn’t necessarily warm to me. But now I have been through childbirth, post-natal depression and struggled with my weight, women seem to relate to me a lot more.
I was having problems with depression and anxiety disorder, and it felt like not blogging about it was creating a false history. When I did finally share the problems I was having, I was shocked – not only by the support that was given to me, but also by the incredible amount of people who admitted they struggled with the same thing.
During the Great Depression, when people laughed their worries disappeared. Audiences loved these funny men. I decided to become one.
Fear, greed and hope have destroyed more portfolio value than any recession or depression we have ever been through.
The simple fact of the matter is, as I know everyone in this room knows, that the recession that this country faced when this President took office was the worst since the Great Depression.
We were just emerging from the Depression. Superman started in 1938. Batman started in 1939. So, we were just recovering.
Depression is a devastating illness, causing great suffering in the afflicted and anxiety to their nearest and dearest: it can hit at any age.
I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair.
When you are in depression, almost magically, nothing motivates you.
I’ve dealt with depression my entire life, on and off, which makes me the perfect author for teenage readers.
In spite of the Depression, or maybe because of it, folks were hungry for a good time, and an evening of dancing seemed a good way to have it.
When I was coming out of depression, I made one random video. It wasn’t funny or anything, but just the idea that people I didn’t know were watching it made me feel less alone than I’d felt in a long time.
A big part of depression is feeling really lonely, even if you’re in a room full of a million people.
When I started out the videos, I was dealing with depression, and I wanted to make inspiring videos for others, which would end up inspiring me in turn. I wanted to show the world that it was possible to make a positive switch in life and start over.
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.
I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.
We certainly had an upheaval at the start of the Great Depression, and that resulted in a lot of financial reform, but it wasn’t done in one stroke, and it wasn’t done immediately. The Depression was in 1929 and resulted in the Securities and Exchange Act of ’33, ’34, ’35, ’37, ’39, and ’41.
My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe’s termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer.
We are inheriting the worst financial system since the Depression. We’re inheriting a situation – when people go back and study major banking crises a quarter century from now, the one that America developed in 2007 and 2008 is going to be one of those crises.
In the Depression especially, I think you learn to face problems and not run away from them.
As a teenager, even as a younger girl, I had some depression but no one really noticed that it was depression nor did I know in those days that that’s what it was but I did feel different from other people.
Concern should drive us into action, not into a depression.
In the Depression, big musicals made a comeback.
I think one thing is that anybody who’s had to contend with mental illness – whether it’s depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever – actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they’ve had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.
There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others.
Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential.
I am one of millions who have been treated for depression and gotten well I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist well versed in using lithium and knowledgeable about my illness, and who was also an excellent psychotherapist.
One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don’t have prior awareness, you don’t have any idea what hit you.
Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn’t in me.
Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.
In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression.
As a child actor, you experience a lot of depression and anxiety… Yes, I went through depression, and it was not comfortable. Yes, I struggle with anxiety and being paranoid, trying to figure out who I am.
In his first term, President Barack Obama played a cautious manager navigating the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression and cleaning up the messes left by President George W. Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think most human beings go through some sort of depression in their life. And if they don’t, I think that’s weird.
Obesity puts our children at risk of developing serious diseases – such as Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and depression. It keeps our children from performing their best at school.
If you don’t think your anxiety, depression, sadness and stress impact your physical health, think again. All of these emotions trigger chemical reactions in your body, which can lead to inflammation and a weakened immune system. Learn how to cope, sweet friend. There will always be dark days.
Depression can kill you. It can also be a spiritually enriching experience. It’s really an important part of my theology now and my spirituality that life is not perfect, and I grew up wanting it to be and thinking that if it wasn’t, I could make it that way, and I had to acknowledge that I had all kinds of flaws and sadnesses and problems.
An entire nation, it seemed, was standing in one long breadline, desperate for even the barest essentials. It was a crisis of monumental proportions. It was known as the Great Depression.
Animals in general have sparked a weird depression in me, because as much as I tried, I couldn’t layer a personality over them. You know what I mean? I would stare at the cows, and I would sing to the cows, and they would always just look at me blankly.
Depression is so treacherous – it can be so alluring as well as punishing. After all, it’s yours and yours alone – no one else can interfere with it.
Certainly there is such a thing as chemical depression, and for that, obviously, there are issues that psychotherapists are much more expert at speaking to, but I think there is a low-grade depression that actually prevails in our society. And most of us feel it.
On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we’ve been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the ‘I’ gets bigger and bigger, and the ‘we’ gets smaller and smaller.
Facts are facts: No president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the Great Depression inherited a worse economy, bigger job losses or deeper problems from his predecessor. But President Obama is moving America forward, not back.
Joining another big time rock band was the last thing I was looking for, but as the tour went on, I really dug playing to a lot of people, the band sounded great, and just being out there again, got me over my depression and so I decided to hop on board.
If you have a little sensibility or a heart, you have all the reason to be depressed once in a while. But the depression is like a motor for creation. I need a little bit of depression, a bit of acid in my stomach, to be able to create. When I’m happy, I just want to dance.
I don’t fear death so much as I fear its prologues: loneliness, decrepitude, pain, debilitation, depression, senility. After a few years of those, I imagine death presents like a holiday at the beach.
Depression, for me, wasn’t a dulling but a sharpening, an intensifying, as though I had been living my life in a shell, and now the shell wasn’t there. It was total exposure.
Depression is a horrible, potentially life-threatening illness – but the lives it threatens are almost always those of the people who suffer from it.
Keep reiterating, again and again, that depression is not something you ‘admit to.’ It is not something you have to blush about it is a human experience. It is not you. It is simply something that happens to you.
We often joke about men moaning about being ill, whether it’s man flu or anything else. We want them to be silent and strong about these things. And that’s quite dangerous when it comes to depression, because talking about it helps. People bottle it up until it’s too late.
Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn’t be a writer without depression.
However much in the foreground depression feels, you are separate to it. This is going to sound cheesy, but I’d say you are the sky. A cloud comes and dominates the sky. But the sky is still the sky. Depression tells you everything is going to get worse, but that’s a symptom. Don’t give depression power – constantly discredit it.
Depressives have led countries, won wars, flown rockets to the moon, made great music. Don’t let depression stop you employing someone, and never let it cause you to judge them. Depression is not a person. Like any other illness, it is something that happens to a person. It shouldn’t define them.
I think it is a luxury and privilege to be sane and well and pessimistic. Because with depression, you have no other option. You don’t want that pessimism, because it is crushing you and keeping you down at the bottom of the well.
People look for patterns in everything. It’s what keeps us sane, I suppose. I struggle to see any patterns in my life. I think I can understand depression a bit because of my sister. My own feelings of… I’m aware that, if you feel down, it can be strangely unrelated to circumstances around you. That’s just the way life is.
My grandmother raised five children during the Depression by herself. At 50, she threw her sewing machine into the back of a pickup truck and drove from North Dakota to California. She was a real survivor, so that’s my stock. That’s how I want my kids to be too.
I struggled with depression when I was in high school, and I remember thinking that if I got a record deal and got a hit song, that it would solve all those problems for me.
There’s nothing, repeat, nothing to be ashamed of when you’re going through a depression. If you get help, the chances of your licking it are really good. But, you have to get yourself onto a safe path.
You know, you become crazy. I had done a story for ’60 Minutes’ on depression previously, but I had no idea that I was now experiencing it. Finally, I collapsed and just went to bed.
Declines in specific industries can never ignite a general depression. Shifts in data will cause increases in activity in one field, declines in another.
If government wishes to see a depression ended as quickly as possible and the economy returned to normal prosperity, what course should it adopt? The first and clearest injunction is: Don’t interfere with the market’s adjustment process.
In his second Inaugural Address, on March 5, 1821, Monroe admitted at last to a general depression of prices, but only as a means of explaining the great decline in the federal revenue. Despite this, he asserted that the situation of America presented a ‘gratifying spectacle.’
The Panic of 1819 exerted a profound effect on American economic thought. As the first great financial depression, similar to a modern expansion-depression pattern, the panic heightened interest in economic problems, and particularly those problems related to the causes and cures of depressed conditions.
The proper governmental policy in a depression is strict laissez-faire, including stringent budget slashing, and coupled perhaps with positive encouragement for credit contraction.
Our ages ranged from 22, down to 18, and we had a 6 month contract to go to Bogata, Columbia. And of course, it was during the depression, we were still with our parents, and things were still pretty tough on them back in the United States.
I don’t think I was awake for much of my childhood. I did a lot of napping. This might have been a defensive measure against encroaching depression. Until about the age of eleven or twelve, I had zero interests other than trying to steal gumballs from supermarket gumball machines.
I’ve known elephants with broken hearts, others with depression.
I suffered from a mild case of postpartum depression after my second child and the physical challenge of maintaining an overnight shift at CBS, a marriage, and two in diapers made the symptoms worse and everyone in the house paid the price.
Enthusiasm is followed by disappointment and even depression, and then by renewed enthusiasm.
Keep yourself busy if you want to avoid depression. For me, inactivity is the enemy.
Sufferers of depression have ‘episodes’ the same way those who suffer from multiple sclerosis do. It comes, wipes the floor with you, and then somehow returns you to the world. But it comes back.
Depression is a surfeit of empathy – a killing empathy – that makes depressives great friends to everyone but themselves. Having a self is a rough business, and depressives can empathize with others who have to deal with it, but not with themselves.
The reason so many intelligent and creative people suffer from depression is that when you take the risk of being fully conscious, you open Pandora’s box, and you can’t close it again.
I had gone through a really rough patch in my life, struggling with anxiety and depression for the first time ever, and it was totally new to me. I really had no idea what was going on, and it was all I could think about, so it was all I could write about.
But through world wars and a Great Depression, through painful social upheaval and a Cold War, and now through the attacks of September 11, 2001, our Nation has indeed survived.
I imagine I was supposed to become a lawyer or something. But this was the Depression the lawyers I saw were all driving cabs. So I thought, ‘Well, if I’m going to be badly off anyway, I might as well be badly off in the theater, where you get used to it.’
Disney’s House of the Future had the clean simplicity prized in the 1950s as relief from decades of frayed patchwork, jury-rigging, and make-do clutter caused by Depression and war.
I can do comedy, so people want me to do that, but the other side of comedy is depression. Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don’t realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.
To get rid of depression, I swim with dolphins.
My recovery from manic depression has been an evolution, not a sudden miracle.
I did not throw out my education lightly, but what I was being taught was of no use in explaining what I saw around me. It was the Great Depression.
I was born in 1935. But my mother and father – who were immigrants from Ireland – and everybody that I knew growing up in Brooklyn came out of the Depression, and they were remarkable people.
I came along and was a teenager in the Depression, and nobody had jobs. So I went out hitchhiking, when I met a man named Woody Guthrie. He was the single biggest part of my education.
I was diagnosed with ADD – see also: raised on sugary cereals and cartoons – and manic depression. So I was prescribed Ritalin for the ADD, and for the manic imbalances I was prescribed mostly benzodiazepines, which I loved, and antidepressants.
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, I suffer psychotic depression.
In the last 5 years, American employers have lost over $150 billion of productivity to depression alone. That is more than the GDP of 28 different States during the same period.
In 1997, a severe depression hit me, but I didn’t respond well to anti-depressants.
What got us out of the depression was capitalism, and we would have gotten out a lot quicker had the government not intervened.
Not since the Depression has the state been this dry, have our rivers been this low, our water table this low, and our reservoirs this low.
Unfortunately, I think depression and anxiety are really hard to live with. And what people don’t need is to feel bad about themselves because they decide to go on medication.
They really do a disservice because these men and women came out of the Depression, they came out of the war.
Even though loneliness affects so many of us, it has gotten scant research attention compared to related conditions like depression or anxiety.
Depression taught me the importance of compassion and hard work, and that you can overcome enormous obstacles.
I think Wilco is going to definitely stand the test of time – no question – and Uncle Tupleo, and the whole No Depression scene, which is now alt-country. I think that’s going to be around a long time.
What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.
I just think my body can’t handle it any more. I did try a little drink a while back, and I was actually physically ill. I went into an immediate depression, and felt awful, just dreadful. So that’s it. I’m over it now.
My parents were born in 1912 they graduated from college into the Depression. They kept notebooks of every nickel they spent, and these habits of frugality from having grown up so poor never left them.
Some days, 24 hours is too much to stay put in, so I take the day hour by hour, moment by moment. I break the task, the challenge, the fear into small, bite-size pieces. I can handle a piece of fear, depression, anger, pain, sadness, loneliness, illness. I actually put my hands up to my face, one next to each eye, like blinders on a horse.
Depression isn’t about, ‘Woe is me, my life is this, that and the other’, it’s like having the worst flu all day that you just can’t kick.
The Nasdaq bubble and crash were followed by the real estate bubble then subprime crash, which led to the unprecedented printing of trillions of dollars in an attempt to prevent a global depression.
If you look at suicides, most of them are connected to depression. And the mental health system just fails them. It’s so sad. We know what to do. We just don’t do it.
I’m a comedian, and I have my share of anxiety and depression so do most of my friends. My humor tends to lie in the juxtaposition of extreme lightness – I’m a huge musical-theater fan – and extreme darkness. And so I really like playing with those because that’s how I feel.
We can alleviate physical pain, but mental pain – grief, despair, depression, dementia – is less accessible to treatment. It’s connected to who we are – our personality, our character, our soul, if you like.
My mother wanted me to be a writer. But she was a child of the Depression and never understood that she wasn’t poor. So, you know, the idea of not having a job, it would creep through. But she tried very hard to be subtle about it.
I’m happy, I would say that I’m one of the happiest people I know but I’ve certainly had periods of profound sadness, depression and heartache and those are the kind of things that are interesting to me to write about.
Examples one finds in the philosophical literature are somebody who’s seen the trial of a child of theirs, where they’re being proved guilty of some crime that would drive the parent into a depression, maybe a suicidal depression.
I have all these rules for avoiding depression. One is going outside in the morning. I don’t keep breakfast in the house, so that I have to go out first thing when I first wake up. And then I come back and shower.
I don’t think I suffered with depression, I don’t think I’m a depressed type of person – I just think I suffered a depression to do with snooker, and I just couldn’t handle it. I could go out and play, but take me out of there and I couldn’t do life. It was a nightmare, my life just felt like a bit of a nightmare.
I, I don’t think anybody’s continually happy, uh, except idiots, you know. You know, you have to have little moments of depression.
After the Great Depression and after public urging, a nationwide public competition was held to determine a design for a memorial that would honor President Thomas Jefferson’s bold vision for westward expansion for America.
The observation that money changes induce output changes in the same direction receives confirmation in some data sets but is hard to see in others. Large-scale reductions in money growth can be associated with large-scale depressions or, if carried out in the form of a credible reform, with no depression at all.
Because its hard to realize now that that was the end of the great depression, you know. All of a sudden all of this is in front of me and I’m solvent, you know. I’m making some money and I know where my next meal is coming from, and I have a new pair of shoes and that’s it.
Investing in auto companies and ensuring a financial collapse didn’t lead not from a recession to a great depression may not have been the most popular thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.
In the Great Depression, you bought something if you had the cash to buy it.
As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn’t occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it.
I’ve discovered that anxiety, panic attacks, and depression can be side effects of lupus, which can present their own challenges.
At the end of the Depression, people were perhaps looking for something to cheer themselves up. They fell in love with a dog and a little girl. It won’t happen again.
The point about manic depression or bipolar disorder, as it’s now more commonly called, is that it’s about mood swings. So, you have an elevated mood. When people think of manic depression, they only hear the word depression. They think one’s a depressive. The point is, one’s a manic-depressive.
Both depression and anxiety disorders, for example, are repeatedly described in the media as ‘chemical imbalances in the brain,’ as if spontaneous neural events with no relation to anything outside a person’s brain cause depression and anxiety.
Do not brood over your past mistakes and failures as this will only fill your mind with grief, regret and depression. Do not repeat them in the future.
Depression is melancholy minus its charms – the animation, the fits.
When I had cancer, people were surprised at how cheerful and upbeat I was, but I couldn’t let myself go to depression – to go there, that defeat would allow everything in. If you look too far into the abyss, you might never come out again. You can stand on the abyss and peep but not give in to sadness.
Schizoaffective disorder is a big mental mash-up of a disease. It combines just about every disorder, from depression, delusions, and paranoia to mania, schizophrenia and hallucinations. My mother bounced between all of these regularly while raising me alone in our Hollywood home.
We don’t know why, but pancreatic cancer has a very interesting physiological link to depression. There seems to be a deep link, and we don’t know what it is.
I prize the Depression, for instance, because I learned the value of things in the Depression that a way people who don’t have to worry about such things never learned to prize it really, I believe.
As a young girl, I saw commitment in my grandmother, who helped Grandpa homestead our farm on the Kansas prairie. Somehow they outlasted the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the tornadoes that terrorize the Great Plains.
Once the notion of depression had begun to dominate the diagnostic armamentarium, it became but a matter of time before patients with relatively mild disorders of mood or anxiety would be entered into it.
There’s been moments of depression in my life, moments when I was in situations that I thought I wouldn’t be able to get out of.
This is what I am. I have periods of enormous self-destructive depression, where I go completely off my trolley and lose all sight of reality and reason.
If you suffer from depression, anything that makes you feel has to the most important thing in your life, because it’s the only thing that can save you.
Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.
I didn’t have any knowledge of the music industry when I first got to L.A., and I really didn’t know on a creative level what I wanted to sound like, so I had to do a lot of experimenting. It led to a spiral of depression and being broke.
When you win a big title like the French Open, it’s tough. The emotion in doing this is really up and down. Afterwards, you feel a little bit lonely, a bit of depression mentally. Because it’s so much stress and emotion, so many people around – and then it’s completely empty.
Well over fifty years ago I was making radio loudspeakers and radio sets in Rochester, New York pretty young and inexperienced but we survived the depression.
But despite historic levels of obstruction, President Obama was able to bring the economy back from the verge of a second Great Depression.
It’s often difficult for those who are lucky enough to have never experienced what true depression is to imagine a life of complete hopelessness, emptiness and fear.
My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms.
Spreading the word about depression is my mission. I am working to build awareness, educate people about the symptoms, and change public opinion and individual attitudes about depression.
Hot, dry katabatic winds, like the south foehn in Europe, the sharav in the Middle East, and the Santa Ana of Southern California, are all believed to have a decided effect on human behavior and are associated with such health problems as migraines, depression, lethargy, and moodiness. Some scientists say that this is a myth.
You could argue that Barack Obama faced in ’08 a situation as bad as any president since the Great Depression. What Obama inherited from the Bush administration, we all remember, was just an absolute global catastrophe.
I won’t dispute that bankers’ privileged treatment in the 2008 crash merits populist scorn. But unfortunately, without a bank bailout, there probably would have been a worldwide depression.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was fortunate: He didn’t take office until nearly four years after the Wall Street crash, by which time the Republicans’ responsibility for the Depression was taken for granted.
The greatest generation was formed first by the Great Depression. They shared everything – meals, jobs, clothing.
The year of my birth, 1940, was the fulcrum of America in the twentieth century, when the nation was balanced precariously between the darkness of the Great Depression on one side and the storms of war in Europe and the Pacific on the other.
Often, we ignore the fact that our spiritual condition and psychological state of mind are highly affected by what is happening to us physically. Sometimes depression is simply the result of exhaustion.
In religious circles, depression is often deemed to be a spiritual condition that can be cured with prayer.
As we consider the causes of depression, those of us in the church must face the ways we might be responsible for creating it.
People who fail to use their emotional intelligence skills are more likely to turn to other, less effective means of managing their mood. They are twice as likely to experience anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and even thoughts of suicide.
I’ve learned to recognize, a lot of it forced through the process of recovery, that I’m wired wrong in certain ways the chemical balance of my brain is off in terms of depression a little bit.
I went from being very popular and the head of the clique in the sixth grade to having, like, kid depression in the seventh grade. Not leaving the house. Not looking people in the eye… My body made me feel bad at everything.
I don’t have a definition for depression. I’m productive, and that’s not a sign of depression, right? And I don’t have weeks where I don’t leave my bed. It seems like depressed people have those.
Discussions of the economy, especially during times of crisis, are often framed in terms of lessons we supposedly learned during the Depression of the 1930s. If we are not to endure terrible times like those again, we are told, we must support whatever form of state intervention is currently being peddled.
Understanding the true causes of the Depression, as well as the real economic record of the United States in the 1930s, is an essential ingredient in anyone’s economic and historical education.
When entertainment was begun, during the Depression, it was supposed to take people’s minds off reality. People could sing, dance, act or do anything. It was the type of entertainment that was available.
When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or ’31, I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners, since they had lost their jobs and couldn’t keep up the payments.
I met my wife in Washington, D.C. I was a senior in college. WW II was about to descend upon us. Jobs were starting to open up after a prolonged depression.
I used to be good friends with my depression, saying oh I’m so depressed, or life is terrible.
In the 20th century, the United States endured two world wars and other traumatic and expensive military conflicts the Depression a dozen or so recessions and financial panics oil shocks a flu epidemic and the resignation of a disgraced president. Yet the Dow rose from 66 to 11,497.
I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.
This might be controversial, but sometimes I think that being happy is a decision. I don’t mean that in a way to diminish clinical depression. But on a more day-to-day level.
Usually halfway through a book I have a serious depression, so I go on safari on my ranch in South Africa, or fishing off my island in the Seychelles. When I come back and re-read it, I think: ‘What was all that about, Smith? It’s fine, just get on with it.’
During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.
There was a time when I was 19 when I really, really, really thought I was going crazy. I was exhausted and going through a terrible depression.
My daddy thought – no, he expected – that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.
I found, when I left, that there were others who felt the same way. We’d meet, they’d come and seek me out, we’d talk about the future. And I found that their depression and pessimism was every bit as acute as mine.
Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.
I use the music to vent, and a lot of the stuff that I am writing about or was writing about contained a lot of anger and anxiety, stress and depression, so that’s how the album came out so dark.
No matter where you are, depression responds to the same treatment.
There seems little doubt in my mind that depression, in particular at the severe end of the experience of this condition, is as real a disorder as diabetes is at the severe end of blood glucose levels.
Depression has existed as long as mankind itself, and certainly well before psychiatry, antidepressant medication, or the nation of America itself came into being.
In the end, I do not think we will find the neat boundary between ‘normal sadness’ and ‘clinical depression,’ if only because mood is an innate human characteristic, like weight or the length of our hair. However, to reject the very notion of depression as an illness on account of these difficulties is throwing the baby out with the bath water.
In my mind, depression is, like all non-communicable diseases, a physiologically expressed condition which is profoundly influenced by our social and cultural environments. Depression is a global crisis not only because it is common and universal, but because the vast majority of affected people suffer in silence or receive inappropriate care.
After clearing the land, planting the orchard, building the house and barn, and surviving the Great Depression, our father died suddenly one winter night when we were small, leaving us to learn about loss before we even knew its name.
