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I do suffer from depression, I suppose. Which isn't that unusual. You know, a lot of people do.

Certainly, I think being depressed is absolutely part of the human condition, it has to be, if there's joy there's its opposite, and it's something you ride if you possibly can.

I have suffered from depression for most of my life. It is an illness.

Well of course I get depressed sometimes, yes I do.

I still get awful depression. It's who I am.

I believe that everyone experiences depression to some degree at some time in their lives. And there are probably millions of people who live with a low level of sadness and heaviness day in and day out.

Instead of seeing depression as a dysfunction, it is a functioning phenomenon. It stops you cold, sets you down, makes you damn miserable.

I have had issues with depression all my life, and it's probably true to say there was a tendency towards it even when I was very young, during my schooldays. There was often - and this is quite common with comics - a sense of not feeling as if I belonged anywhere.

My own life was filled with so much love and joy that when depression struck, it was like a prison door slamming shut and I was being placed in an isolation cell. No one else could possibly be feeling what I was. I hated my depression and all of its symptoms.

Depression is close to me, but suicide hasn't been.