Sadness is more or less like a head cold - with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Barbara KingsolverRead
There is no point treating a depressed person as though she were just feeling sad, saying, 'There now, hang on, you'll get over it.' Sadness is more or less like a head cold- with patience, it passes. Depression is like cancer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
It emphasizes the difference between sadness and depression, advocating for a deeper understanding and empathy towards those struggling with mental health issues.
In this quote, Barbara Kingsolver urges us to recognize the severity of depression compared to ordinary sadness. While sadness can be transient and may pass with time, depression is a profound and often debilitating condition that requires compassion and support. By likening depression to cancer, she highlights that it is a serious illness that cannot simply be wished away, underscoring the need for understanding and proper treatment.
Themes
DepressionSadnessMental HealthEmpathyUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
In a mental health awareness event, you can use this quote to highlight the importance of recognizing the seriousness of depression.
More from Barbara Kingsolver
All quotes →Children can be your heartache. But that doesn't matter, you have to go on and have them . . . it works out.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I'm of a fearsome mind to throw my arms around every living librarian who crosses my path, on behalf of the souls they never knew they saved.
Barbara KingsolverRead
I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinions, mountains don't move. They only look changed when you look down on them from great height.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own.
Barbara KingsolverRead
Similar quotes
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.
Matt HaigRead
No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy
Kay Redfield JamisonRead
When I believe, I am crazy. When I don’t believe, _x000D_ I suffer psychotic depression.
Philip K. DickRead
I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I shan't recover this time. I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it but cannot fight any longer.
Virginia WoolfRead
my brain had begun to endure its familiar siege: panic and dislocation, and a sense that my thought processes were being engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.
William StyronRead
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.
Dick CavettRead