Being a depressive should not imply danger any more than being a man or even a human should. Mental illness isn't a them/us issue; we are all on the scale somewhere. So we must be very careful to resist ignorance and combat the stigma that leads to dangerous silence.

Just as our parents quieted us when we were noisy by putting us in front of the television set, maybe we're now learning to quiet our own adult noise with Prozac.

Depression is like a bruise that never goes away. A bruise in your mind. You just got to be careful not to touch it where it hurts. It's always there, though.

I had really bad obsessive-compulsive disorder. At its worst, I was compelled to leave my house at three o'clock in the morning and go out in the alley because I just knew that the paper-towel roll I threw in the recycling bin was uncomfortable, like it was lying the wrong way, and I would be down in the garbage.

I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.