You can't fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can't wake up and say, 'Today I'm not being depressed!' It's a process to get well, but there is recovery.
Interpretation
Recovery from mental health issues takes time and cannot be achieved simply by willpower.
This quote highlights the challenges of dealing with mental health issues and emphasizes that recovery is not a matter of just deciding to feel better each day. It acknowledges the complexity of mental health and the importance of the healing process, reinforcing that while it may be difficult, recovery is possible with time and proper support.
In practice
In a mental health awareness talk, highlighting the importance of understanding recovery processes.
Don't feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don't feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can't work at your best unless you're a whole person.
The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.
Do you know what prepares you for the mental hospital? Being a prime minister's wife.
Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.
I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage.
I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election - after I'd worked so hard - I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.
In a typical mental health catch-22, the alienating nature of depression tends to keep its sufferers from finding their way to the very support groups that might help them.
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.
People are realising that vulnerability isn't a weakness, and the rise of mental health-related humour is making vulnerability feel like a strength.
I am unable to describe exactly what is the matter with me; now and then there are horrible fits of anxiety, apparently without cause, or otherwise a feeling of emptiness and fatigue in the head.
When you're depressed, there's no calendar. There are no dates, there's no day, there's no night, there's no seconds, there's no minutes, there's nothing. You're just existing in this cold, murky, ever-heavy atmosphere, like they put you inside a vial of mercury.
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.
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