Appendix (4): Good Mood: The New Psychology of Overcoming Depression

Good Mood

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Good Mood:
The New Psychology
of Overcoming Depression

Chapter 2

cont.

A Massachusetts teacher after he voluntarily went to a hospital community for two weeks:

For weeks I had been coming awake every morning with a sick, empty feeling, with a dread of the long hours before I could crawl back in bed. How could I endure yet another day when life seemed so meaningless, so tasteless, that there was nothing I looked forward to doing? This day was the worst yet: I was still the captive of my depression, and I realized where I was. What would I do with myself all day, confined within this tiny hospital ward? Would I ever get well again, or was this just the first of an endless succession of empty days? I writhed under the covers, I groaned; I crouched in a fetal position, I pounded my fists on the pillow.(13)

Van Wyck Brooks:

There came a time...when my own bubble burst, when the dome under which I had lived crumbled into ruin, when I was consumed with a sense of failure, a feeling that my work had all gone wrong and that I was mistaken in all I had said or thought...

I could no longer sleep. I scarcely sat down for a year...when I napped for an hour or so I dreamed that I was about to be hanged...All my affections and interests fell into abeyance, and it seemed to me that, where normal depressions occasionally sank to zero, mine sank from zero indefinitely down...

I was possessed now with a fantasy of suicide that filled my mind as the full moon fills the sky. It was a fixed idea. I could not expel this fantasy that shimmered in my brain and I saw every knife as something with which to cut one's throat and every high building as something to jump from. A belt was a garotte for me, a rope existed to hang oneself with, the top of a door was merely a bracket for the rope. Every rusty musket had its predestined use for me and every tomb in a graveyard was a place to starve in. I could see an axe only as lethal and every bottle meant for me something to be swallowed in splinters or to slash one's wrists with, while even the winter snow fell in order to give one pneumonia if one spent a night lying on the ground. Meanwhile, every morning, when I began to sleep again, I awoke with my arms folded over my breast. I had been dreaming that I was dead at last and unconsciously arranged my limbs in the posture of a mummy...

In my crise a quarante ans I shrank from all human relations...(14)

Leo Tolstoy:

It had come to this, that I, a healthy, fortunate man, felt I could no longer live: some irresistible power impelled me to rid myself one way or other of life. I cannot say I wished to kill myself. The power which drew me away from life was stronger, fuller, and more widespread than any mere wish. It was a force similar to the former striving to live, only in a contrary direction. All my strength drew me away from life. The thought of self-destruction now came to me as naturally as thoughts of how to improve my life had come formerly. And it was so seductive that I had to be wily with myself lest I should carry it out too hastily. I did not wish to hurry, only because I wanted to use all efforts to disentangle the matter. 'If I cannot unravel matters, there will always be time.' And it was then that I, a man favoured by fortune, hid a cord from myself, lest I should hang myself from the crosspiece of the partition in my room, where I undressed alone every evening, and I ceased to go out shooting with a gun, lest I should be tempted by so easy a way of ending my life. I did not myself know what I wanted: I feared life, desired to escape from it; yet still hoped something of it.

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