This comes from Heather Graham's blog, Dooce. Although I hate to dwell on mental illness, she's quoting a reporter from New Orleans who went into a deep depression after Katrina. It's so difficult to describe any sort of mental illness, and each person's version is different. I don't think I was ever seeking the understanding of the diseases, just patience and indulgence of people I know. I had a really bad experience with this when I told my (then) husband about my situation. His response was "I don't want to deal with it." Those are his exact words. Thank you very much, O Compassionate One. Fortunately I had a really good support group during that time and those people listened to me endlessly. I talked to Barb every single nightevery single night. That was one thing that got me through the whole experience of separation, diagnosis and the attempts to get my life back.

I’m including it here because I get a lot of email from people who are the husband or the wife or sister or friend of someone who suffers depression, and they want to know what they can do to help. There is no fast answer to that, but the first step is to try and understand what depression is like for those who suffer from it, to stand by and not judge them for the maelstrom of crap going on in their heads.
A few excellent quotes from the column:
Hopeless, helpless and unable to function. A mind shutting down and taking the body with it. A pain not physical but not of my comprehension and always there, a buzzing fluorescent light that you can’t turn off.
No way out, I thought.
I had crying jags and fetal positionings and other “episodes.” One day last fall, while the city was still mostly abandoned, I passed out on the job, fell face first into a tree, snapped my glasses in half, gouged a hole in my forehead and lay unconscious on the side of the road for an entire afternoon. [you can call this rolling your car if you want--ER]

You might think that would have been a wake-up call, but it wasn’t. Instead, like everything else happening to me, I wrote a column about it, trying to make it all sound so funny.
I hate being dependent on a drug. Hate it more than I can say. But if the alternative is a proud stoicism in the face of sorrow accompanied by prolonged and unspeakable despair — well, I’ll take dependency.