“The whole key to life is discovering things for yourself. What you do with that discovery is what lies on the other side of that door.”

“Strange isn't it, people spend their time making nice things and other people come along and brake them.”

“Klonopin ruined my lie. It takes away your drive, and in the morning, you don't want to get out of bed, because you feel so groggy. I don't even know what it's like to feel normal. This is my world. Things don't get me as excited as most people because I'm in a constant state of sedation. It should never have been prescribed for long-term use.”

“I have always been told that a person has to accept that the illness is chronic," she says, at the end of our interview. "You can be 'in recovery,' but you can never be 'recovered.' But I don't want to be on disability forever, and I have started to question whether depression is really a chemical thing. What are the origins of my despair? How can I really help myself? I want to honor the other parts of me, other than the sick part that I'm always thinking about. I think that depression is like a weed that I have been watering, and I want to pull up that weed, and I am starting to look to people for solutions. I really don't know what the drugs did for me all these years, but I do know that I am disappointed in how things have turned out."Such is Melissa Sances's story. Today it is a fairly common one. A distressed teenager is diagnosed with depression and put on an antidepressant, and years later he or she is still struggling with the condition. But if we return to the 1950s, we will discover that the depression rarely struck someone as young as Melissa, and it rarely turned into the chronic suffering that she has experienced. Her course of illness is, for the most part, unique to our times.”

“The hour and a half that we've spent in the gym has flown by; I guess self-discovery is a fast-paced affair.”

“If you expand the boundaries of mental illness, which is clealry what has happened in this country during the past twenty-five years, and you treat the people so diagnosed with psychiatric medications, do you run the risk of turning an anger-ridden teenager into a lifelong mental patient?”

“That experience allowed me to see this therapeutic principle in action," Stanton said. "You just can't organize yourself without a connection to another human being, and you can't make that connection if you embalm yourself with drugs.”