The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain.

On Major Depression, quoted by the great William Styron of Sophie's Choice & Darkness Visible:From Darkness Visible, William Styron"It is a positive and active anguish, a sort of psychical neuralgia, wholly unknown to normal life.

Mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from natural experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain.

The pain is unrelenting; one does not abandon, even briefly, one's bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes.

Which is worse, past or future? Neither. I will fold up my mind like a leaf and drift on this stream over the brink.