Quotes from Lauren Slater

The most miraculous moments of my life were not when my daughter and son were born, but when the second or third Prozac pill shot down my throat and catapulted me into a world called sane.

And I saw and still see everything that I do have, but no matter what, there is always the itch of what gets lost.

In 1955, at their peak, American mental hospitals held 560,000 patients nationwide, double the number at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1988, three decades later, that figure had fallen to 120,000.

I went over to my bookshelves, makeshift boards on bricks. I had a lot of books, most of them nonfiction, because I'd always felt that in nonfiction, specifically in the disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and theology, I might find clues about ways to live my life.

After all, when you are sick, there are plenty of places (insurance willing) where you can go to get healed, but when you are healed are there any places you can go to learn not to be sick?

In the time of Philotimus, a notable Greek physician several centuries BCE, sufferers complaining of a light head were instructed to wear a lead helmet in hopes of a cure. Chrysippus of Cnidus, a contemporary, believed that people with depression should eat more cauliflower while carefully avoiding basil because it could incite someone to insanity.

Accordingly, in the spring of 1951, Rhône-Poulenc distributed eighteen ampules of their novel compound for clinical testing, which meant something very different in those days from what it does in ours. Doctors "tested" a new drug in one of two ways: either by taking it first themselves and recording in a notebook their own responses, or by handing it to a small sample of patients and observing the effects.

the clear water the color of deeply steeped tea, surrounded by cattails and gracile grasses.

instead of spelling stories you spread silence, which was outside the alphabet.

In 1936, shortly after the first lobotomies were performed in Lisbon, the procedure came to our side of the sea, where it was adapted with all-American vigor, so much so that by the late 1950s, more than twenty thousand patients had had lobotomies and the surgery was being used to "cure" everything from mental retardation to homosexuality to criminal insanity.

I didn't know then that the mind, like the earth, has several layers: a crust, a mantle, a boiling core.

been used in India to treat fever, vomiting, snakebite, insomnia, and insanity for thousands of years, reserpine was introduced in the United States at around the same time as Thorazine, but while Thorazine was used clinically, reserpine was used more experimentally.

tethered to the ground by quotidian conversation. ... the window rosy with anemic November light.

The new antipsychotics are now a multibillion-dollar industry in this country, and by 2011 they had surpassed statins—cholesterol-lowering agents such as Lipitor and Zocor—as the best-selling category of drugs in the United States, a truly mind-boggling fact when one considers how rare psychosis is in the population.

There is nothing like having a doctor who really cares about you—who can speed up the inhuman pace of medical time, which usually leaves patients begging to hear their test results, waiting too many days for an appointment, at a loss until the conveyor belt brings along the next hurried intervention. 247, Marjorie Williams, A Matter of Life and Death.

I looked up "skin" in the encyclopedia and confirmed that, sure enough, it is the human body's largest organ, a fact that suggests our surfaces are critical to who we are, not just the gateway to physical or spiritual depths but a profoundly important web of cells that, in protecting us, gives us form and function.

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond.

It's called "the five to one rule." In bad relationships, in fact in reliably doomed relationships, there are always two or more insults for every six interactions the couples have.

When I got the dogs they were puppies, and so were

Sometimes, in the movie theater or the supermarket, I look around at people who I suppose live their lives without a chemical crutch, and they amaze me.

I'm aware of the incredible elasticity of life, how the buckled can become straight, the broken mended. Watch what is on the ground; watch what you step on, for it could contain hidden powers and, in a rage, fly up all emerald and scarlet to sting your face.

But the reflections came clear to me then, come still in quiet moments when past meets present so smoothly the seams disappear and time itself turns fluid. Sometimes I wish time stayed solid, in separable chunks as distinct as the sound of the ticking clock on my mantel. In truth, though, we break all boundaries, hurtling forward through hope and backward on the trail made by memory.

When you die, there's that much less breath to the world, and across continents someone supposedly separate gasps for air. When Marie, Joseph, peter, Moxi, Oscar, when I weep for you, don't forget I weep as well for me.

One…two…three…getting closer, my heart hammering half with fear, half with relief. Safe again. Trapped again.