You can't fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can't wake up and say, 'Today I'm not being depressed!' It's a process to get well, but there is recovery.
Interpretation
Recovery from mental health issues takes time and cannot be achieved simply by willpower.
This quote highlights the challenges of dealing with mental health issues and emphasizes that recovery is not a matter of just deciding to feel better each day. It acknowledges the complexity of mental health and the importance of the healing process, reinforcing that while it may be difficult, recovery is possible with time and proper support.
In practice
In a mental health awareness talk, highlighting the importance of understanding recovery processes.
Don't feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don't feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can't work at your best unless you're a whole person.
The label 'wife of the prime minister' is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I'm a human being.
Do you know what prepares you for the mental hospital? Being a prime minister's wife.
Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.
I tried to be a good wife, but I was lost in my gilded cage.
I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election - after I'd worked so hard - I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.
Depression isn't just being a bit sad. It's feeling nothing. It's not wanting to be alive anymore.
Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.
Depression begins with disappointment. When disappointment festers in our soul, it leads to discouragement.
I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then my means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lose a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.
People are realising that vulnerability isn't a weakness, and the rise of mental health-related humour is making vulnerability feel like a strength.
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.
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