There is a false moral imperative that seems to be all-around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles.

One of the things that frequently gets lost in descriptions of depression is that the depressed person often knows that it is a ludicrous condition to feel so disabled by the ordinary business of quotidian life.

I just look at my own life, which is full of error as all life is. I have done plenty of things that I am not proud of.

Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.

I went through elementary school being bullied and teased. I remember someone - I can't recall his name, but I can see his face - who decided on the school bus, when I was ten or eleven, to call me "Percy." That was somehow supposed to connect to the fact that I wasn't very athletic. I was, in fact, also not very coordinated. I was not very masculine, by the standards of ten-year-olds. I remember being on the school bus and everyone chanting, "Percy! Percy! Percy!" at me.

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it.

When a church manipulates the law to say, "These people are lesser," it takes a lot of resilience to hold your head up and say, "I am not lesser!" Some people can do it and some cannot; and some of those people who cannot will be destroyed.