Zitat des Tages von Kay Redfield Jamison:
I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease.
Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that's just given.
Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.
I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do.
I think one thing is that anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.
One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don't have prior awareness, you don't have any idea what hit you.
Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn't in me.
There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others.
Nothing good comes out of depression.
It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy.
Mood disorders are terribly painful illnesses, and they are isolating illnesses. And they make people feel terrible about themselves when, in fact, they can be treated.
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.
Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.
A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.
It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.
Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.
People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It's hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.
People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through, and it really helps you out. At the end of the day, it gets you through because you have to reform your relationship, and you have to figure out a way of getting to the future.
There are a lot of studies that suggest a higher rate of creativity in bipolars than the general population.
Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.
There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.
You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.
Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.
'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief is probably not the most effective way of looking at it. I mean, at the end of the day, people suffer enormously, and you want to treat it.