Happiness Quote by Siobhan Fahey

“Depression scares people off” lands like a flat report from someone who’s watched the room change the moment honesty enters it. Fahey isn’t describing depression as an inner weather system; she’s describing it as social radiation, a condition that doesn’t just hurt the person living with it, but reorganizes everyone else’s behavior. The phrase “scares people off” is blunt, almost animalistic: a herd instinct, a quick backstep, a sudden silence. It frames depression less as a private illness than as a communal failure of nerve.

Then comes the pivot: “It makes me laugh that it has that kind of effect.” That laugh isn’t light; it’s defensive and diagnostic. Humor here works like a musician’s timing trick, flipping the expected posture (sadness, confession, fragility) into something sharper: contempt for the discomfort of others, and a refusal to beg for their steadiness. Subtext: if your suffering makes people flee, you start treating abandonment as predictable, even ridiculous, because that’s easier than treating it as betrayal.

As a pop figure, Fahey is also commenting on the marketplace of palatability. Audiences, friends, even collaborators want the aesthetic of melancholy, not the administrative reality of depression: missed calls, low affect, unglamorous need. Her line exposes the gap between how culture romanticizes darkness and how quickly it penalizes it in real life. The laughter is the punchline and the armor.