Letters to a Young Madman

Clinical depression is not, as one might think, a time of deep emotion; it is, rather, caught up in a single, vague, all-consuming emotion that is like a shallow version of regret. You regret everything, but not enough to do anything about it. Every exertion requires extraordinary effort, as if you were trying to function at the bottom of an ocean. You are condemned in clinical depression to thinking about nothing but yourself, and you loathe, find ugly, besotted, putrid absolutely everything about yourself. To be in clinical depression is to experience a third dimension in which you are still technically alive but incapable of living.