Whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But, in fact, depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying.

This line is spoken by Hazel Grace Lancaster, the teenage narrator of John Green’s novel about adolescents living with terminal cancer. It occurs in the early chapters as Hazel reflects on how cancer education materials routinely include “depression” as a clinical “side effect,” a framing she finds inadequate to the lived reality of serious illness. The remark is shaped by Hazel’s experience of being treated not only as a patient but as someone expected to display certain “appropriate” emotions. In the scene’s broader context, Hazel is pushing back against the medicalized, checklist language surrounding cancer and insisting that despair is tied to mortality itself rather than to the disease as an isolated condition.

The speaker challenges the clinical framing that treats depression as an automatic “side effect” of cancer, arguing instead that despair arises from confronting mortality. The distinction shifts attention from the disease as a purely medical condition to the existential reality it forces upon patients: fear, grief, and anticipatory loss. The quote also critiques the impersonal language of pamphlets and websites, suggesting that standardized lists can miss the lived experience of illness. By locating depression in “dying” rather than “cancer,” it emphasizes that emotional suffering is tied to meaning, finitude, and the disruption of a future—an insight that invites more humane, psychologically attentive care.