The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression QUOTES

1 " Perhaps my depression coincided with the start of every academic year and the subsequent increase in my workload. Or maybe there was a more biological explanation linked to the fact that I, like many people with depressed mood, find the absence of light at these latitudes intolerable in the winter months. I didn't know the answer - I still don't. This is who I am. I cope most of the time; I am well for months, sometimes even for more than a year; but there are recurring periods in my life when the world seems a darker, more hostile and unforgiving place. I am a person who gets depressed. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

2 " Yet, I believe that my experience of depression has helped me to be a more humane and understanding therapist. Psychiatrists get depressed too, more often than other doctors. Being an expert in depression doesn't confer any immunity from it and I am aware that I don't have all the answers. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

3 " What I do know is that when a person is first asked to explain what is wrong, they may find it almost impossible to articulate exactly what the problem is. They may not yet have matched words to the feelings they can sense in the hidden rooms of their mind. They may still have no clear ideas about the "what", "why" or "how" relating to the origins of their difficulties. Instead of words, their angst may be expressed in behaviour which may be hard for them, or anyone else, to make sense of and can manifest itself as irritability, anger or withdrawal. Sometimes they will delay seeking help until they are in a state of crisis. It's not easy to ask; I struggled at first, too. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

4 " Work had almost become my only reason for living and my relationship with psychiatry had become the single most important dimension of my life, far more important to me than my marriage or my friendships. This was why, I realise now, failure in the examination shook my sense of identity so profoundly. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

5 " I wish he had been given another chance at life, but there would still have been a great deal of work to do together in disentangling his depressed mood from his dependence on alcohol. Some people drink because they are depressed; sometimes drink can make you depressed. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

6 " In his classic text 'Mourning and Melancholia', Freud linked depression and grief by hypothesising that in unresolved grief the image of the person lost to us becomes fused with our own 'self'. Melancholia, a severe form of depression, comes about when anger is internalised and directed inwards towards this new and changed 'self'.
We can fail to grieve not only for the dead. A similar process occurs when we cannot come to terms with the loss of other things that are important to us: people, ideas, beliefs and hopes. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

7 " I have seen many people in my career who almost believe it is really possible to magically plan out how your life will turn out, and they try to plan their children's lives too. Sometimes it seems as though they can, because nothing terrible has ever happened to them in their lives thus far; everything has gone as expected. Then they experience a loss, and the closer this loss relates to their sense of who they are, and where they see their lives going, the greater the difficulty will be in coming to terms with it. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

8 " I had temporarily lost my way and then found it again, but I failed to understand that coming off the pre-ordained track of my life might have been what I really needed. I have learned that sometimes those moments of chaos, when life careers off the rails, hold important messages about things we need to change in our existence – and the rigid expectations that we, and others, have of us that we need to challenge – before it is too late. If we address these, we can start to move forward once more, towards achieving our own goals. If we choose the goals ourselves, we have a better chance of success. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

9 " I saw myself reflected in the windowpane against the night sky. Another lamp, another me, beyond the glass, just within reach. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

10 " As far as I was concerned, 5 minutes was not enough and infinity would have been too short. This was a place I connected with. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

11 " The sky was everywhere, huge, utterly inescapable and full of light. I was caught within it. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

12 " I did not begin to come to terms with losing my father for a long time after his death. And I will always miss him. Grieving means having to let go and move on, and when you are able to, it becomes possible to remember the person you have lost as they really were – not as an idealised saint or vilified target for anger and disappointment, but as a complicated, real and very human being. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

13 " diamonds. I knew that no matter what happened in my relationships with people, I would always love this place. This was a place and a moment to which I could always return, a link to the person I had been before experiencing marriage, death and disappointment in love. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

14 " I can see now that Dad was ultimately my saving grace; his actions if not his words taught me the enduring power of love and helped to shape the person I have become. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

15 " There are times when the past still seems alive in the present. We relive the difficulties and problems from our early relationships with those who are important to us now. Sometimes if a person is failing to recover, or having repeated episodes of depression, it becomes clear that he or she needs to revisit their past to understand and challenge its continuing impact. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

16 " She was always criticising me. It always began in the same way: there would be an argument over me not helping enough with the housework because I had homework to do or because I wanted to go out with friends. Whatever I did was never, ever enough. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

17 " If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.' George Eliot, Middlemarch "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

18 " You are somewhere you don't want to be, with people who make you feel uncomfortable, who you think do not like you; you certainly dislike some of them. They are ambitious and confident, with their own agendas and their own scores to settle. Pause for a moment. Take a deep breath. Remember why you are here and what you want to achieve. Remember what your goals are. In order to achieve these, you have to spend time with people, but it doesn't mean you have to like them, be liked by them or even attempt to be like them. Imagine your cat is sitting on your lap and you are stroking his ears. Just wait for your moment, take another deep breath and say the minimum you need to say to make your point.
Then shut up. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

19 " I have learned that however bleak the world may seem, we are able to find reasons to carry on living in it. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression

20 " My skin is still too thin and I am easily wounded, and I still live my life in a state of perpetual fear of being discovered to be a fraud. I am frequently anxious. Day to day life can still be a struggle. Yet, despite experiencing depression, I have achieved a great deal in my work and been very happy in my second marriage; I think both of these owe something to my extended therapies and medication, and each of these methods of treatment has played an important role. "

― , The Other Side of Silence: A Psychiatrist's Memoir of Depression