Top 40 Sally Brampton Quotes
#1. Severe depression, put simply, is an overwhelming and unmanageable onslaught of every normal, human fear and difficult emotion. It is a loss of and lack of perspective and proportion.
Sally Brampton
#2. I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.
Sally Brampton
#3. Sometimes," says a fellow depressive, "I wish I was in a full body cast, with every bone in my body broken. That's how I feel anyway. Then, maybe, people would stop minimising my illness because they can actually see what's wrong with me. They seem to need physical evidence.
Sally Brampton
#4. I often find myself grateful for the comfort of strangers; a man who gave up his seat for me on the bus, a woman who helped me out with a heavy shopping bag. Remembering small acts of kindness puts the world in a finer, sweeter order.
Sally Brampton
#5. You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard.
Sally Brampton
#7. Bad enough to be ill, but to feel compelled to deny the very thing that, in its worst and most active state, defines you is agony indeed.
Sally Brampton
#8. The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.
Sally Brampton
#9. If we go on behaving in the same way, we will crash. If we pretend that those obstacles in our character don't exist, or are something else entirely, we will still crash. But if we acknowledge them and behave in a different way, we will come to a better and safer place.
Sally Brampton
#10. There is a saying, 'it's never too late to have a happy childhood'. I'd rephrase that. I'd say, it's never too late to stop a difficult childhood from turning us into unhappy adults.
Sally Brampton
#12. Who are you when you are no longer who you are? What do you do with a self that is no longer your self? If you don't know who you are, how do you go on living? If you cannot live as yourself, who and what is it that you are living for?
Sally Brampton
#13. I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key.
Sally Brampton
#14. Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.
Sally Brampton
#15. Therapy helped, but it is not magic. It does not change our thoughts or behaviours. It only teaches us what they might be. It does not work unless we take from it what we have learned and put it into action.
Sally Brampton
#16. Why does nobody understand that these are tears without a beginning or an end? I thought sadness had a beginning and an end. And a middle. A story, if you like. I was wrong.
Sally Brampton
#17. I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be a cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.
Sally Brampton
#18. If our minds can hold us back, then they can push us forwards too.
Sally Brampton
#19. I had carried on when all I wanted was to be dead. I had stayed alive for other people. I never stayed alive for myself. I cannot begin to describe the intensity of that effort.
Sally Brampton
#20. Why do they call it a 'mental' illness? The pain isn't just in my head; it's everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken.
Sally Brampton
#21. Sometimes I think depression should be called the coping illness. So many of us struggle on, not daring or knowing how to ask for help. More of us, terribly, go undiagnosed.
Sally Brampton
#22. I find it easy to spot a depressive. The illness is scrawled across them like graffiti.
Sally Brampton
#23. It's all very well learning why I behave in the way that I do. That doesn't stop me behaving in those ways. I am just more conscious of them.' Consciousness is where therapy stops and we begin. Therapy can only give us knowledge. It is up to us to use it.
Sally Brampton
#24. I know how it feels to be told that it's all in your mind. It drives you mad.
Sally Brampton
#25. The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopoeia is palliative. That is, all of them are symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them you're back at square one.
Sally Brampton
#26. I was feeling low. Low is the depressive's euphemism for despair.
Sally Brampton
#27. Religion is for people who don't want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who've been there.
Sally Brampton
#28. Everyone else has a work party,'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad.
Sally Brampton
#29. It did not seem to matter whether I was present or not. After a time I became resentful, feeling that the flowers mocked me, blooming in defiance of my listless misery.
Sally Brampton
#30. Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.
Sally Brampton
#31. This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong.
Sally Brampton
#32. My creative powers have been reduced to a restless indolence. I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything either. I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and reading has become repugnant to me. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are robbed of everything.
Sally Brampton
#33. Once severe depression has a hold, it is unshakeable until it has run its course or that course has been diverted by treatment.
Sally Brampton
#34. Normal is a piece of string. What's normal for one person is off the chart for another.
Sally Brampton
#35. As to whether the depression will come back, it is every depressive's fear.
Sally Brampton
#36. I use humour to hide behind, because I cannot bear to feel my feelings, cannot face the truth.
Sally Brampton
#37. I believe, completely, that life is about connection; that nothing else truly matters.
Sally Brampton
#38. A part of my depression lies, I think, in my unanswered question: Where is home? I feel a sense, always, of trying to find my way back to a place that doesn't exist.
Sally Brampton
#39. Letting go is not getting rid of. Letting go is letting be.
Sally Brampton
#40. It is two years since I emerged from depression and I no longer want myself dead. I want myself alive. I am no longer my own enemy. Depression is the enemy. The monster lives at my gate. My hope is that, with sufficient effort and luck, I can keep it there.
Sally Brampton
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