William Styron said this about the lived experience of depression:

It is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair…comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this cauldron…it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.

— William Styron in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage, 1992)