“My only problem was a new tendency to wake up some mornings with a great dark weight shoving my shoulders toward the floor and causing me to weep inside my car and basically haul myself around as if it were the world’s biggest effort to stand up straight and carry on a conversation. Except for its having shown up so arbitrarily and then coming and going in waves, there was nothing interesting about my version of what my husband and I came to think of as the Pit; anybody who has been through a depression knows what a stretch of semidisabling despair feels like, and for my part I had a very nice life, a terrific family and a personal interior chorus of quarreling voices demanding to know why I didn’t pull up my socks and carry on, which in fact was the first question I planned to ask a psychiatrist.”

Cynthia Gorney
The New York Times, April 18, 2010,
page MM52 of the Sunday Magazine