“Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don't kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, "He fought so hard." And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”

“Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everyone else has a work party,'Kate said. 'So why shouldn't we? We're working hard at not being mad.”

“Imagine saying to somebody that you have a life-threatening illness, such as cancer, and being told to pull yourself together or get over it.Imagine being terribly ill and too afraid to tell anyone lest it destroys your career.Imagine being admitted to hospital because you are too ill to function and being too ashamed to tell anyone, because it is a psychiatric hospital.Imagine telling someone that you have recently been discharged and watching them turn away, in embarrassment or disgust or fear.Comparisons are odious. Stigmatising an illness is more odious still.”