Read this if you're feeling depressed
If you find yourself lost in the woods, bloodied and filled with the Horror, here's a few things I recommend doing;
Read Hamlet as many times as it takes. A dude living in London about 400 years ago came up with the best depiction of depression ever created by a human being. The strength of connection between you and the characters = you and the writer = you and the audience for which he was writing = are strong enough to help carry you through.
Read angry men: There's loads of them and their dark, twisted, cynical humour is a perfect cocktail for the occasion. If you're drowning in your own sorrow, these guys will be more than happy to sit at the bar right beside you: Charles Bukowski, Raymond Chandler, Hunter Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, George Orwell and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Read the heaviest of the heavies. The Big Ones deal with human frailty and the brutal shit we all have to endure. I started with the Tao, the Books of Job and Ecclesiastes in the Bible and Basho and Rumi’s poetry.
Help yourself to some self help. Self-help is easy to shit on. But read five self-help books, the really good ones and we’ll see who's laughing when you get up early, get shit done, feel healthy and aren’t depressed anymore. Some good ones to start with: Man’s Search for Meaning, The Untethered Soul, The Body Keeps the Score, 12 Rules for Life, The Hero with 1,000 Faces.
Face the darkness: Read books about the worst things humans have had to live through and you might not feel so down. Good places to start: Forgotten Voices of WW1, WW2 & the Holocaust, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, Rape of Nanking, Ordinary Men, If This is a Man, Shake Hands with the Devil, Hiroshima.
Read Anna Karenina: The best counterargument to suicide I've ever come up against is in the final chapters of Anna Karenina. If you wanna walk down that particularly nasty imaginative path, all you have to do is follow Tolstoy and surrender to the unbelievable power of his prose.
If you're feeling depressed then I'm sorry to hear it. All I can recommend doing is picking up some books because they might save your life.
Read hard. Read wide. Read free.