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021c017
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here is, for me, a mixture of longings for an earlier age; this is inevitable, perhaps, in any life, but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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9fcab05
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My thoughts were so fast that I couldn't remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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eed6dec
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I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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b89021a
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Many wish to believe that the odd is not so odd, the bizarre not so bizarre, and there is little changing of minds once they are set. There are only so many ways to understand the strange and disordered. The Greeks imagined gods to explain what they themselves could not. It is human nature to invent reasons for why the mind shatters, hope plummets, or the will to live dies. Scientific explanations are complicated and, for many, less humanly..
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science
pseudoscience
mental-illness
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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b03dd10
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There was a fine-tuning of Richard's and my temperaments during the years we lived with his heart disease, lymphoma, and lung cancer. Before, our differences had triggered sporadic tension; now our basic natures served us better. Our sensibilities and quirks evolved into something more shared and complex, more mingled.
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illness
relationships
love
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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09d5b05
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We put our faith in things great and small. We assign to them meaning they may actually have, or meaning that we need for them to have in order to carry on.
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meaning
life
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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dc98722
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Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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489330d
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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.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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e74e6df
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Even so, what I read often disappeared from my mind like snow on a hot pavement.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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2f02e93
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People say, when I complain of being less lively, less energetic, less high-spirited, "Well, now you're just like the rest of us," meaning, among other things, to be reassuring. But I compare myself with my former self, not with others."
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d23569b
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I kneeled without ecstasy, prayed without belief, and felt as a stranger.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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2042fe2
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Try not to let the fact that you can't read without effort annoy you. Be philosophical. Even if you could read, you probably wouldn't remember most of it anyway.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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5ac8c3d
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This was not why I had gotten a Ph.D., and I was beginning to understand Bob Dylans lines "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." Only it was twenty-three years, and I was still pulling a lot of night shift as well." --
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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ebfc6f5
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It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven't understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person's world.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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3c23f96
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but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods. I miss the lost intensities, and I find myself unconsciously reaching out for them, as I still now and again reach back with
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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aa369a7
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he slowly put down the hamburger he was eating, stared straight into my eyes, and, without missing a beat, said rather dryly, "That explains a lot."
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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787758c
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I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no--and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I suppose I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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7409327
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am reminded of Byron's wonderful description of the rainbow that sits "Like Hope upon a death-bed" on the verge of a wild, rushing cataract; yet, "while all around is torn / By the distracted waters," the rainbow stays serene: Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien."
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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1026963
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So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters; worn death "as close as dungarees," appreciated it--and life--more; seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly lear..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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d73157d
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In the bipolar patients we have studied, there is a significantly increased number of small areas of focal signal hyperintensities [areas of increased water concentration] suggestive of abnormal tissue. These are what neurologists sometimes refer to as 'unidentified bright objects,' or UBOs.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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4219ea1
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I also started giving Christmas lectures to the house staff and clinic staff that focused on music written by composers who had experienced severe depression or manic-depressive illness. These informal lectures became the basis for a concert that a friend of mine, a professor of music at UCLA, and I subsequently produced in 1985 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In an attempt to raise public awareness about mental illness,
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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9edc869
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manic-depressive illness, we proposed to the executive director of the Philharmonic a program based on the lives and music of several composers who had suffered from the illness, including Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz, and Hugo Wolf.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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27c33e1
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knew better than to assume a straight shot at happiness: If we see a light at the end of the tunnel, he said, it's the light of an oncoming train.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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3df236c
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It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters ... I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit."
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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cabe69e
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His wife maintains she can tell whether or not Jim is in the house simply by the amount of energy she feels in the air. But
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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dc0f965
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Mogens Schou, a Danish psychiatrist who, more than anyone, is responsible for the introduction of lithium as a treatment for manic-depressive illness,
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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f53c58d
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John Cade's article about the use of lithium in acute mania first appeared in 1949, in an obscure Australian medical journal,
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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63bb372
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It did the kind of lasting damage that only something that cuts so quick and deep to the heart can do.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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a7b5e30
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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..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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b24fcc3
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manic-depressive illness can confer advantages on both the individual and society. The disease, in both its severe and less severe forms, appears to convey its advantages not only through its relationship to the artistic temperament and imagination, but through its influence on many eminent scientists, as well as business, religious, military, and political leaders. Subtler effects--such as those on personality, thinking style, and energy--..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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b159fd4
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Schubert's posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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a0cf32f
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Mania is a strange and driving force, a destroyer, a fire in the blood.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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647553f
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Now and again she would break in with "Yes, yes, that's very interesting," "Of course you can," or "Had you thought of ...?" Never, but never, was there an "I don't think that's very practical" or "Why don't you just wait and see how it goes?" --
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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47ebc7c
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He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute passion and attention.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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58e1156
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Navy Cotillion was where officers' children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen or fifteen years hadn't already made it painfully clear, that generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of c..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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5e39ed8
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Naquela noite, enquanto esperava (bordando, vendo a neve cair, ouvindo Chopin e Elgar) que meu ingles apaixonado e instavel aparecesse, eu de repente me conscientizei de como a musica me parecia clara e tocante; como era de uma beleza extrema e melancolica o fato de eu observar a neve e esperar por ele. Eu estava sentindo mais beleza, mas tambem mais tristeza de verdade. Quando ele surgiu - elegante, acabando de chegar de um jantar de cerim..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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8fef797
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But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills cannot, do not, ease one back into reality; they only bring one back headlong, careening, and faster than can be endured at times. Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confuse..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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7c6cdfa
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But it has been precisely that persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, that helped keep me alive through all of the years of pain and nightmare that were to come.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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c994ffa
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I was one of many who owed their lives to the black circles and squares in Schou's family tree.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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deba1e8
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As his psychotherapist for years, I had been privy to his dreams and fears, hopeful and then ruined relationships, grandiose and then shattered plans for the future. I had seen his remarkable resilience, personal courage, and wit; I liked and respected him enormously. But I also had been increasingly frustrated by his repeated refusals to take medication. I could, from my own experience, understand his concerns about taking lithium, but onl..
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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e6519f5
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Humor and absorption on friends'faces are replaced by fear and concern.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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24dd421
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He was a psychiatrist, as well as a warm, whimsical, and witty man who had a mind like a cluttered attic.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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feb4681
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Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |
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2cedd9e
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For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably, be dead or insane.
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Kay Redfield Jamison |