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the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was on...more

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In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and de...more

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Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, ange...more

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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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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...more

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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 depressio...more

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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--t...more

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Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rathe...more

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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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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 ...more

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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 ...more

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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 o...more

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When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. ...more

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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 depre...more

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God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew...more