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6bdf9c2
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When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.
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madness
reality
manic-depression
mental-illness
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Marya Hornbacher |
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d73ddb7
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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, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don't remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. 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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depression
manic-depression
mania
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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4bafa79
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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
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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8a7f0ac
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I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between...I am still so naive; I know pretty much what I like and dislike; but please, don't ask me who I am. A passionate, fragmentary girl, maybe?
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depression
contrary
manic-depression
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Sylvia Plath |
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22f490f
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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 see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.
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depression
manic
psychopathology
manic-depression
bipolar-disorder
mania
mental-disorder
mental-illness
psychology
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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7a2636b
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It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun.
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manic-depression
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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bb429fe
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"I read it as if it had been written by someone else, although it was my own experience being recounted. The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. "Maniac-depressive illness." I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts in his land and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun,"
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manic-depression
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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086306f
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That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.
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suicide
suicidality
tormented-mind
tortured-artist
sylvia-plath
manic-depression
bipolar-disorder
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d8de119
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lsh`wr b'nk Tby`y l'y ftr@ Twyl@ mmtd@ y`Tyk amlan ytDH -tqryban bthbt- 'nh mktwb@ `l~ lm!
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manic-depression
mental-illness
mental-health
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d2c5631
|
kn `l~W 'n 'Hwl 'n 'wfq byn fkrty `n nfsy knsn@ ttklm bhdw wmnDbT@ tmm, nsn@ `l~ l'ql Hss@ `mwm l'mzj@ wmsh`r lakhryn.. wbyn mr'@ skhT@ wmjnwn@ tmm wfqd@ lkl mnfdh lsyTr@ `l~ lnfs wltfkyr l`qlny
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depression
manic-depression
mania
mental-illness
psychology
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Kay Redfield Jamison |