Certainty that an acute episode [of depression] will last only a week, a
month, even a year, would change everything. It would still be a
ghastly ordeal, but the worst thing about it -- the incessant yearning
for death, the compulsion toward suicide -- would drop away. But no, a
limited depression, a depression with hope, is a contradiction. The
experience of convulsive pain, along with the conviction that it will
never end except in death -- that is the definition of a severe
depression.
~ George Scialabba