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a4ad6d6
|
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond b..
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illness
depression
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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ccf8498
|
If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
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depression
mood-disorders
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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ea44c2a
|
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is perva..
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mental-illness
psychology
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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eff8054
|
I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow."
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manic
mania
mental-illness
psychology
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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9106d77
|
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. 'This is my last experiment,' wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. 'If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I'll have to be shown.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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5691ba8
|
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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edb06ea
|
We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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3c4d954
|
Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.
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mood-disorder
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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2134311
|
Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.
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illness
manic-depresison
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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30e05e0
|
I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.
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tiredness
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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e43f8d0
|
Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.
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humour
love
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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cd160b7
|
Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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688baba
|
It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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3cb9bb4
|
Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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933305d
|
But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.
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humor
manic
mania
mental-illness
psychology
|
Kay Redfield Jamison |
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f2ea044
|
Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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a925d2c
|
No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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97d6d18
|
I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d8018eb
|
We all move uneasily within our restraints.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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a4fc211
|
I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.
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mood-swings
psychiatry
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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5b971b9
|
Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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ffcb5ce
|
Depression is awful beyond words or sounds or images...it bleeds relationships through suspicion, lack of confidence and self-respect, the inability to enjoy life, to walk or talk or think normally, the exhaustion, the night terrors, the day terrors. There is nothing good to be said for it except that it gives you the experience of how it must be to be old, to be old and sick, to be dying; to be slow of mind; to be lacking in grace, polish ..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
|
8799972
|
We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication--we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling t..
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walls
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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6e92dfd
|
Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d73ddb7
|
When I am high I couldn't worry about money if I tried. So I don't. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, eleg..
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depression
manic-depression
mania
|
Kay Redfield Jamison |
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8bd02fe
|
I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there u..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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2c09c5b
|
The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness--to the individual himself and to others--and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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a682e10
|
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
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monsters
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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22a83f9
|
I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81)
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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7306996
|
Time does not heal, It makes a half-stitched scar That can be broken and again you feel Grief as total as in its first hour. -Elizabeth Jennings
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d63737b
|
Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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1ebdd8a
|
One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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4bafa79
|
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.
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manic-depression
mental-illness
mental-health
|
Kay Redfield Jamison |
|
e8f4cb5
|
I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior.
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temperament
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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6874c0c
|
Time will pass; these mood will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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84e0607
|
I had tried years earlier to kill myself, and nearly died in the attempt, but did not consider it either a selfish or a not-selfish thing to have done. It was simply the end of what I could bear, the last afternoon of having to imagine waking up the next morning only to start all over again with a thick mind and black imaginings. It was the final outcome of a bad disease, a disease it seemed to me I would never get the better of. No amount ..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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22f490f
|
Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to..
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|
depression
manic
psychopathology
manic-depression
bipolar-disorder
mania
mental-disorder
mental-illness
psychology
|
Kay Redfield Jamison |
|
705f659
|
Suicide Note: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss. -Langston Hughes
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
|
261c192
|
I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there u..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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6ef9a54
|
I realized that it was not that I didn't want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn't know why I wanted to go on
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grief
love
|
Kay Redfield Jamison |
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e692c13
|
Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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828a301
|
I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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387cb85
|
Looking at suicide--the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind--is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
|
788a302
|
The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description. Novelist William Styron, however, in recounting his struggle with suicidal depression, captures vividly the heavy, inescapable pain that can lead to suicide: What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |