Top 35 Sally Brampton Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Killing oneself is, anyway, a misnomer. We don’t kill ourselves. We are simply defeated by the long, hard struggle to stay alive. When somebody dies after a long illness, people are apt to say, with a note of approval, “He fought so hard.” And they are inclined to think, about a suicide, that no fight was involved, that somebody simply gave up. This is quite wrong.”

— Sally Brampton

2. “The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopoeia is palliative. That is, all of them are symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them you’re back at square one.”

— Sally Brampton

3. “I thought therapy was a sort of magic, that you just kept talking and the very act of talking unlocked some forgotten key.”

— Sally Brampton

4. “Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it. Action has magic, grace and power in it.”

— Sally Brampton

5. “The Buddhists tell us that in order to find yourself, you first have to lose your mind.”

— Sally Brampton

6. “You can keep difficult emotions at bay for a very long time, even for a lifetime but for most of us, at some point in our lives, they will demand to be heard.”

— Sally Brampton

7. “Religion is for people who don’t want to go to hell. Spirituality is for people who’ve been there.”

— Sally Brampton

8. “I use humour to hide behind, because I cannot bear to feel my feelings, cannot face the truth.”

— Sally Brampton

9. “Therapy helped, but it is not magic. It does not change our thoughts or behaviours. It only teaches us what they might be. It does not work unless we take from it what we have learned and put it into action.”

— Sally Brampton

10. “There is a saying, ‘it’s never too late to have a happy childhood’. I’d rephrase that. I’d say, it’s never too late to stop a difficult childhood from turning us into unhappy adults.”

— Sally Brampton

11. “Why does nobody understand that these are tears without a beginning or an end? I thought sadness had a beginning and an end. And a middle. A story, if you like. I was wrong.”

— Sally Brampton

12. “Depression is a paralysis of hope. One thing I know is true. Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.”

— Sally Brampton

13. “Why do they call it a ‘mental’ illness? The pain isn’t just in my head; it’s everywhere, but mainly at my throat and in my heart. Perhaps my heart is broken.”

— Sally Brampton

14. “Try never to abandon hope for if you do, hope will surely try to abandon you.”

— Sally Brampton

15. “We are not easy to help. Nor are we easy to be around. Nobody with a serious illness is easy to be around. Although not obviously physically disabled, we struggle to get things done. Our energy levels are dangerously low. Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.”

— Sally Brampton

16. “If we go on behaving in the same way, we will crash. If we pretend that those obstacles in our character don’t exist, or are something else entirely, we will still crash. But if we acknowledge them and behave in a different way, we will come to a better and safer place.”

— Sally Brampton

17. “I am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness.”

— Sally Brampton

18. “Sometimes, we find it hard to talk. We get angry and frustrated. We fall into despair. We cry, for no apparent reason. Sometimes we find it difficult to eat, or to sleep. Often, we have to go to bed in the afternoon or all day.”

— Sally Brampton

19. “Once severe depression has a hold, it is unshakeable until it has run its course or that course has been diverted by treatment.”

— Sally Brampton

20. “I am terrified she will give up on me, that this thing will drive her away. Every depressive has that fear. Why would anyone want us? We don’t even want ourselves. Sometimes, we try to drive the people who love us away. Not because we don’t want them with us, but because we cannot bear for them to see what we have become.”

— Sally Brampton

21. “I am the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be a cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better I cannot tell; I awfully forbode I shall not. To remain as I am is impossible. I must die or be better.”

— Sally Brampton

22. “Normal is a piece of string. What’s normal for one person is off the chart for another.”

— Sally Brampton

23. “It is not that science is failing us. It is simply that the solution is as complex and multifaceted as the illness itself. For every theory of its causes, there is another to contradict it; for every new treatment, there is another that dismisses it as ineffective. This is not deliberate obstruction. Depressive illness, as well as being complex, is highly individual. What works for one person does not work for another. And often there is no explanation why this is so.”

— Sally Brampton

24. “I believe, completely, that life is about connection; that nothing else truly matters.”

— Sally Brampton

25. “It’s all very well learning why I behave in the way that I do. That doesn’t stop me behaving in those ways. I am just more conscious of them.’ Consciousness is where therapy stops and we begin. Therapy can only give us knowledge. It is up to us to use it.”

— Sally Brampton

26. “I was feeling low. Low is the depressive’s euphemism for despair.”

— Sally Brampton

27. “This is not really me. I am not like this. I am like you. I am not a patient from a mental hospital. I am just an ordinary woman whose mind has gone temporarily wrong.”

— Sally Brampton

28. “My creative powers have been reduced to a restless indolence. I cannot be idle, yet I cannot seem to do anything either. I have no imagination, no more feeling for nature, and reading has become repugnant to me. When we are robbed of ourselves, we are robbed of everything.”

— Sally Brampton

29. “Severe depression, put simply, is an overwhelming and unmanageable onslaught of every normal, human fear and difficult emotion. It is a loss of and lack of perspective and proportion.”

— Sally Brampton

30. “In order to break the treaty, we have to learn to ask for and then, just as crucially, accept help. First, though, it is important to understand ourselves, and to discover what it is that we need. Habits set up over a lifetime may be hard to break but, certainly, it is easier once you have identified them.”

— Sally Brampton

31. “Who are you when you are no longer who you are? What do you do with a self that is no longer your self? If you don’t know who you are, how do you go on living? If you cannot live as yourself, who and what is it that you are living for?”

— Sally Brampton

32. “When you have spent long years in the dark, there is joy in seeing the light and pleasure, above all, in the ordinary.”

— Sally Brampton

33. “It did not seem to matter whether I was present or not. After a time I became resentful, feeling that the flowers mocked me, blooming in defiance of my listless misery.”

— Sally Brampton

34. “I looked like me. I sounded like me. But I wasn’t me.”

— Sally Brampton

35. “I know how it feels to be told that it’s all in your mind. It drives you mad.”

— Sally Brampton

36. “What we resist, will persist.”

— Sally Brampton

37. “If our minds can hold us back, then they can push us forwards too.”

— Sally Brampton