Kay Redfield Jamison famous quotes

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Taken #Long #Storm

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Grief #Comes And Goes

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 experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Jobs #Divorce

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Inspirational #Self #Bipolar

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 medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Pain #Dark

I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Tired #Hypocrisy #Acting

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Wall #Sadness

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Family #Mother #Play

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Suicidal #Thinking

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Play #May

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Pain #Motivation

Manic depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Desire #Erode #Behavior

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Unique #Suffering

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Pain #Reality

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Horse #School #Choices

One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Titles #Degrees #Dishonesty

The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicidal #Brain #Mind

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Lasts #Finals

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Sadness #Made #Manifest

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 know why I wanted to go on
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Bereavement #Goes On #Want

Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Believe #Life Is #Complicated

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Life

Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Ancient #Social #Confidentiality

The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in the wonderful moment of the sherry afterward, admission into a very old club, parties of celebration, doctoral gowns, academic rituals, and hearing for the first time "Dr.," rather than "Miss" Jamison.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Party #Missing #Way

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Vulnerable #Temperament

When I am high I couldn't worry about money of I tried. So I don't. The money will come from 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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Worry #Bipolar #Cards

Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #America #Bipolar

I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Bipolar #Optimist

I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write ...
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Writing #Thinking

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Pain #Loneliness #Reality

Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Taken #Suicidal #Journey

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 can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated...
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Simple #Thinking #Choices

Others would say to me, 'It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it,' but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, 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?
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Moving #Thinking #Ideas

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Mother #Horse

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Loss #Blood

Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Moving #Passion #Grace

Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Nature #Heaven #Earth

The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Knowledge #Exhilaration #Ancient

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Pain #Suicidal

Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Moving #Reality #Mind

Far too many doctors-many of them excellent physicians-commit suicide each year; one recent study concluded that, until quite recently, the United States lost annually the equivalent of a medium-sized medical school class from suicide alone. Most physician suicides are due to depression or manic-depressive illness, both of which are eminently treatable. Physicians, unfortunately, not only suffer from a higher rate of mood disorders than the general population, they also have a greater access to very effective means of suicide.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #School #Mean

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Beautiful #Believe #Chinese

Without science, there would be no such hope.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Would Be

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Successful #Dying

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#People #Facts #Painful

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Emotional #Years #Bipolar

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, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Psychosis #Violence #Illness

Tumultuouness,if coupled to discipline and cool mind,is not such a bad sort of thing.That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life,one ought to terms with one`s darker side ad one`s darker energies
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Discipline #Mind #Sides

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Way #Causes

Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Confusion #Aftermath

...Time does not heal, It makes a half-stitched scar That can be broken and again you feel Grief as total as in its first hour. -Elizabeth Jennings
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Grief #Broken #Firsts

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Children #Educational #Play

Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Real #Chaos #Improvement

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Crazy #Real #Suicidal

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Years #Long #Damage

We all move uneasily within our restraints.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Moving #Restraint

Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Suicidal #Names

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Ideas #Bipolar #Awareness

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. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Unique #Profound #Owing

I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Girl #Dream #Looks

The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Favors #Ancient #Reason

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

#Advantage

The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Attitude #Impact #Dubious

I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Caring #News #Clarity

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#People #Mental Health #Complicated

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise---and inexplicably---to be envied.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#California #Cold #Wasps

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Loss #Medical #Fit

Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Memories #Desire #Impulse

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 one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Giving Up #Believe

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?
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Sad #Depression #Moving

I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81)
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Numbness #Wish #Despair

Suicide Note: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss. -Langston Hughes
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Suicide #Kissing #Rivers

I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Pain #Water #Settling

I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Kindness #Importance

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Given #Complexity #Comprehension

I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn't say that kept me alive; all the compassion and wamrth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Stupid #Optimistic #Feel Better

Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Substance #Essentials #Behavior

It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn’t imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Regret #Grateful #Different

Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our argument here-"sharpened and unusually creative thinking" and "increased productivity"?
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Self Esteem #Sleep #Thinking

I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no subsitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Real #Passion #People

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 turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Pain #Wall #Sadness

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Fear #Monsters #Mets

There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Believe #Mind #Enough

Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Looks

I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Vacuums #Cracks #Behavior

Nothing good comes out of depression.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers...Restlessness and discontent are vital things... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Teacher #Passion #Curiosity

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 feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars....But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable....It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Depression #Stars #Pain

St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Loss #Years #Remembrance

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.
-- Kay Redfield Jamison

#Able #Telephones #Helping