Mania is as bad as it gets. If not treated, it will become worse, more frequent, and harder to treat.
Kay Redfield JamisonRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the sense of timelessness and heaviness that comes with depression.
Rod Steiger's quote conveys the profound experience of depression as a state where time loses its meaning and everything feels burdensome. In this dense atmosphere, the individual feels trapped in a cold and murky existence devoid of structure, making it challenging to escape the overwhelming feelings of despair.
In practice
In a speech addressing mental health awareness, this quote can be used to illustrate the isolating feeling of depression.
Mania is as bad as it gets. If not treated, it will become worse, more frequent, and harder to treat.
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.
Mental health is an ongoing process of dedication to reality at all costs
For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.
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.
There are peaks, there are valleys. But they're all kind of carved and smoothed out, and it feels like a low level of despair you live in. Where you're not getting any answers, but you're living OK. And you can smile at the office. You know? But it's a low level of despair. I was on Prozac for a long time. It may have helped me out of a jam for a little bit, but people stay on it forever. I had to get off at a certain point because I realized that, you know, everything's just OK.
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