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That's the hallmark of depression: you can't believe that one day you'll get better.
这就是抑郁的特点：你无法相信有一天你会好起来。
Well-meaning friends say: "You'll be fine, you'll see." But you only look at them with dismay and even start to resent them: they're so wide of the mark. It's so clear they haven't got a clue.
好心的朋友会说："你会好起来的，你等着看吧。" 但你只会沮丧地看着他们，甚至开始怨恨他们：他们真是大错特错。很明显，他们对抑郁一无所知。
When you're in a depression you think that you'll never come out of it, that you won't come out alive, that the only way out is suicide.
当你处于抑郁中时，你认为你永远不会走出来，你不会活着走出来，唯一的出路就是自杀。
If you don't kill yourself, however, sooner or later you will come out of it, and then once you're out of it you cross over into the camp of the well-meaning friends and can no longer imagine this state of intolerable and seemingly endless distress.
然而，如果你不自杀，总有一天你会走出困境，一旦你走出来了，你就会加入善意朋友的阵营，再也无法想象这种难以忍受、似乎无穷无尽的痛苦状态。
When I was young, I had a bad trip on hallucinogenic mushrooms. They sent me to hell, which is, by definition, frightful and never-ending.
我年轻的时候，有一次吃了致幻蘑菇而产生严重幻觉。这些蘑菇让我身处地狱，按照定义来讲，地狱是可怕的，没有尽头的。
But I was lucid in my nightmare, and told myself: "Don't panic. I took poison. Its effect will last as long as it takes me to digest it, in eight or 10 hours it'll be over, I just have to hold on until then."
但我在这场噩梦中很清醒，我告诉自己："不要惊慌。我只是中毒了。毒性会持续到我消化完这些毒蘑菇，再过8到10个小时就结束了，我只需要坚持到那个时候就行。"
I said this to reassure myself, it was reasonable and true, but at the same time I wondered: "Can I hold on until then? In eight or 10 hours will I still be alive?"
我这样说是为了安慰自己，这是合理的，也是真实的，但同时我也在想："我能坚持到那会儿吗？再过8个小时或10个小时，我还会活着吗？"
I lived through it, and I know that once you're back among the living you put this hell into perspective, you quickly forget the horror. As Louis-Ferdinand Celine puts it in Journey to the End of the Night, "The biggest defeat in every department of life is to forget, especially the things that have done you in."
我最后挺过来了，我现在知道，一旦你活过来了，你就会正确地看待这个地狱，很快就会忘记那种恐惧。正如路易·费迪南·塞利纳在《茫茫黑夜漫游》中所说的那样："生命中最大的失败莫过于忘却，尤其是忘却那些杀死你的事情。"
Anyway. Unfortunately for me, I'm no stranger to depression.
不管怎样，不幸的是，我对抑郁症并不陌生。
But what I still didn't know during my first psychiatric consultations is that, in the definition of bipolar disorder, the pole opposite the dive into depression isn't necessarily a state of spectacular euphoria and disinhibition that leads to social suicide and often to suicide itself, but just as frequently what psychiatrists call hypomania, which means in plain language that you act like a fool, but not to the same extent.
但在第一次接受精神病学咨询时，我还不知道在双相情感障碍的定义中，陷入抑郁的对立面并不一定是导致社死或自杀的惊人的兴奋和情绪释放，而常常是精神病学家所说的轻躁狂，用通俗的语言来说就是你表现得像个傻瓜，但程度不同。
