You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.
Interpretation
Depression should be viewed as a legitimate health condition, akin to physical ailments.
This quote by Matt Haig emphasizes the importance of recognizing depression as a serious health issue, equivalent to physical illnesses such as cancer or heart disease. It advocates for the destigmatization of mental health conditions, reinforcing that experiencing depression does not diminish a person's worth or humanity, and encourages compassion and understanding for those affected by such challenges.
In practice
During a mental health awareness event, I shared this quote to highlight the importance of understanding depression.
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.
It can be difficult for people to talk about it, because there still is that stigma around mental illness. But I would encourage people to do that, because they'll be surprised once they do 'come out' how many other people have had similar experiences.
Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
We need, ultimately, to be able to view mental health with the same clear-headedness we show when talking about physical health.
You don't have to be a creative maverick to have a troubled mind. You just have to be human. There is no 'us' and 'them.' No one is one hundred per cent healthy, physically or mentally.
Teenagers are in some ways the best readers because their imaginations haven't been narrowed down by boring things like jobs and the realities of money and capitalism.
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.
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.
Years of depression have robbed me of that—well, that give, that elasticity that everyone else calls perspective.
I wasn't creative when I was depressed. When my depression got treated, I was creative again.
If you have a relative who's lost interest in everything and doesn't get out of bed, who doesn't care for things they used to, can't imagine anything that would give them any pleasure, don't fool around with it; get therapy, get help, get medication if that's right for you, or talk therapy, or something.
No one who had never been depressed like me could imagine that the pain could get so bad that death became a star to hitch up to, a fantasy of peace someday which seemed better than any life with all this noise in my head.
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