It was as if this man whom they had all so greatly admired, and who had endured so much at the hands of the Nazis -a man of exemplary resilience and courage- had by his suicide demonstrated a frailty, a crumbling of character they were loath to accept.

...with their minds turned agonizingly inward, people with depression are usually dangerous only to themselves. The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence.

In Paris on a chilly evening late in October of 1985 I first became fully aware that the struggle with the disorder in my mind--a struggle which had engaged me for several months--might have a fatal outcome.

A lot of the literature available concerning depression is, as I say, breezily optimistic, spreading assurances that nearly all depressive states will be stabilized or reversed if only the suitable antidepressant can be found; the reader is of course easily swayed by promises of quick remedy...I am hardly able to believe that I possessed such ingenuous hope, or that I could have been so unaware of the trouble and peril that lay ahead.

Our perhaps understandable modern need to full the sawtooth edges of so many of the afflictions we are heir to has led us to banish the harsh old-fashioned words: madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, madness. But never let it be doubted that depression, it its extreme form, is madness.

depression, when it finally came to me, was in fact no stranger, not even a visitor totally unannounced; it had been tapping at my door for decades.

It was not really alarming at first, since the change was subtle, but I did notice that my surroundings took on a different tone at certain times: the shadows of nightfall seemed more somber, my mornings were less buoyant, walks in the woods became less zestful, and there was a moment during my working hours in the late afternoon when a kind of panic and anxiety overtook me, just for a few minutes, accompanied by a visceral queasiness.

While I was able to rise and function almost normally during the earlier part of the day, I began to sense the onset of the symptoms at midafternoon or a little later- -gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.

E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.And so we came forth, and once again beheld the stars.