Minds have their own weather systems. You are in a hurricane. Hurricanes run out of energy eventually. Hold on.

What doesn't kill you very often makes you weaker. What doesn't kill you can leave you limping for the rest of your days. What doesn't kill you can make you scared to leave your house, or even your bedroom, and have you trembling, or mumbling incoherently, or leaning with your head on a window pane, wishing you could return to the time before the thing that didn't kill you.

MINDS ARE UNIQUE. They go wrong in unique ways. My mind went wrong in a slightly different way to how other minds go wrong. Our experience overlaps with other people's, but it is never exactly the same experience.

Forcing yourself to see the world through love's gaze can be healthy. Love is an attitude to life. It can save us.

But it only takes a doubt. A drop of ink falls into a clear glass of water and clouds the whole thing. So the moment after I realised I wasn't perfectly well was the moment I realised I was still very ill indeed.

She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery. That, she supposed, was the basis of depression as well as the difference between fear and despair. Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.

I miss you,' she said into the air, as if the spirits of every person she'd loved were in the room with her.

Illness has a lot to teach wellness. But when I am ill I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.

She'd been petrified of motherhood. The fear of a deeper depression. She couldn't look after herself, let alone anyone else.