This is an excerpt from the book Night falls Fast by Kay Redfield Jamison:
"The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because their despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description. Novelist Will Stryron, however, in recounting his struggle with suicidal depression, captures vividly the heavy, inescapable pain that can lead to suicide:
"What I begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from this smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion."
"My Mind"
