QUOTE : Manic depression is both artist and assassin. While it plays artist, it is on your side: generous, generating, connective and vital. But then the psychomachy begins, a battle between a God and a Devil for the possession of the soul, and the artist stealthily becomes assassin. In depression, the mind feeds on itself, self-cannibalizing. The soul-loss of depression is well attested, and many people in the anguish of depression know that familiar cry: ‘I hate myself.