I speak of a clinical depression that is the background of your entire life, a background of anguish and anxiety, a sense that nothing goes well, that pleasure is unavailable and all your strategies collapse.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the pervasive and overwhelming nature of clinical depression, highlighting its impact on a person's entire existence.
Leonard Cohen's quote delves into the depths of clinical depression, illustrating how it can cast a shadow over every aspect of life. It describes a profound sense of anguish and anxiety that colors one's experiences, leading to a feeling of helplessness where joy seems unattainable and personal efforts to cope or find relief feel futile. This portrayal emphasizes the challenging and all-encompassing nature of mental health struggles.
In practice
Using this quote in a mental health awareness campaign to illustrate the severity of depression.
What is most original in a man's nature is often that which is most desperate. Thus new systems are forced on the world by men who simply cannot bear the pain of living with what is. Creators care nothing for their systems except that they be unique. If Hitler had been born in Nazi Germany he wouldn't have been content to enjoy the atmosphere.
I always thought that poetry is the verdict that others give to a certain kind of writing. So to call yourself a poet is a kind of dangerous description. It's for others; it's for others to use.
Be With Me In The Phases Of My Work Because My Brain Feels Like It Has Been Whipped And I Yearn To Make A Small Perfect Thing Which Will Live In Your Morning Like Curious Static Through A President's Elegy Or A Nude Hunchback Acquiring A Tan On The Crowded Oily Beach.
I heard of a man who says words so beautifully that if he only speaks their name women give themselves to him. If I am dumb beside your body while silence blossoms like tumors on our lips it is because I hear a man climb stairs and clear his throat outside our door.
I think what we like about music - and what we like about art in general....is that enterprise that stops our minds from spinning. Because we're always all over the place. A good song, a good lyric is a movie: it will just focus and calm and confer significance on this completely bewildering reality that all of us live in.
Most of the time one is discouraged by the work, but now and again by some grace something stands out and invites you to work on it, to elaborate it or animate it in some way. It's a mysterious process.
For me, depression is very much tied to my feeling that so much is being asked of me. I have to 'perform' rather than necessarily be myself. I have to perform a perfect Margo Jefferson, at an impossibly high level.
When I look at the patients that I've cared for with mental illness, I know that many of them took years to come forward and tell somebody that they were in pain and that they needed help.
Getting help for substance abuse can be reduced to the deceptively simple focus of ‘keeping away from the dope.’ But what does getting help with depression mean? Learning to keep away from your own mind?
You are no less or more of a man or a woman or a human for having depression than you would be for having cancer or cardiovascular disease or a car accident.
When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.
It can be difficult for people to talk about it, because there still is that stigma around mental illness. But I would encourage people to do that, because they'll be surprised once they do 'come out' how many other people have had similar experiences.
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