Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one...

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The re...

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pai...

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness...

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and ex...

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came dow...

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, f...

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forc...

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damag...

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psych...

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forc...

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of ...

Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental....

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce...

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...

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—an...

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decisio...

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is ha...

the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to ...

An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned fr...

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seeme...

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...

In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leav...

Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect ...

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.

There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that ...

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psych...

Far too many doctors-many of them excellent physicians-commit suicide each year; one recent study co...

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhe...

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current s...

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, th...

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.

Depression, somehow, is much more in line with society's notions of what women are all about: passiv...

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come wit...

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons...

He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most w...

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense...

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being with...