The paper is an attempt to outline a "dictionary of depression" (the semantics and phraseology of the condition) understood as a modern version of l'écriture mélancolique. The rhetorical power of depression as an illness, against all appearances conducive to text-generating, manifests itself in peculiar imagery and metaphors used by the authors of pathographic works (among the analyzed texts there are autobiographical notes by Tomasz Jastrun, Jerzy Pilch and William Styron). It is a result of mixing up the vocabulary of modern, drug-oriented psychiatry, nineteenth-century and early modernist metaphors alluding to conventionalized properties of grief, and individual attempts to verbalize inner feelings, often connected with a performative dimension of recording/enacting depression through text.