Quotes from Peter D. Kramer

Part of the impetus for my writing is the pain I've seen my friends experience both in their marriage and in their dreams.

I do not like to see men walk away from women in late middle age.

Suicide is what the death certificate says when one dies of depression.

Support has no direction. Our plan is to hold the patient - to strengthen the container - until the patient develops his own container-strengths or until the contents settle down. We do not know just how or when all this ought to happen. Worse we do not have a particularly cogent rationale for limiting our own actions...

Depression, in its insidious way, acts as a degenerative disease, harming nerve cells. Like

When people come into the office and say they've tried to make their marriage work, and I hear what the effort was, it seems to me that there's some lack of understanding of what effort is.

Doctors don't go through life mentally integrating trial results; but any automaton who had regulated his practice that way would have been in danger of underprescribing.

We have, all of us, less control over our emotional states than we imagine, and not much more over our moral sensibilities.

If you entrust a nation's economy to an impulsive leader with no care for facts, disaster will follow.

Grandiose patients often imagine that we know more about them than we do.

Global warming, police brutality, voter suppression, racism. In his hands, weighty considerations escaped the pull of gravity. Damn, what a show!

Today, citizens were at once less trusting and more credulous. Many had swallowed lies of vast proportion.

We undervalue irrationality, I believe. It can protect us in hostile settings.

Lying was his brand. He was too bold to bother with accuracy and too visionary to be held accountable in small matters. Lies served as virtue signaling—the virtue of those who disdain experts, science, stability, and convention.

Race and class divisions, power imbalances, anti-intellectualism, anti-democratic leanings, and widespread poverty—not to mention Ponzi schemes—once we saw them as glitches in a country built on high ideals. The Great Man showed us otherwise. The flaws we had called incidental were underpinnings. They comprised a grand tradition, present always.

He could leave the land in ruins and remain beloved. He had made history. He was the end of history.

I use chaos as leverage. I have made chaos normal. Chaos engenders chaos. The chaos I reek now opens the door to the vast chaos to come. I revel in chaos.

The culture was ready to be dominated by a man with his mix of braggadocio, bullheadedness, celebrity, cruelty, prejudice, know-nothingness, and, yes, narcissism and sociopathy and paranoia. My husband glommed onto a ready host, to our society with all its flaws and weaknesses, and the glomming made him great.

The contrast between a patient depressed and a patient recovered is the contrast between absence and presence.

One needs to realize that the symptoms of vital depression are often not spontaneously mentioned Ã¢â'¬Â¦ They are often concealed by other symptoms which may seem to be more severe. They may not come to the patient's mind even with questioning. Patients admit to these symptoms only as the links of an integral whole in a dialogue that is free and comprehensible.

Asked about their gravest cases, med students say, A patient who had been doing well in treatment lost his job, could not afford his medicine, resumed drinking, missed his clinic appointments, and after four months was brought to the emergency room by the police. Paralyzing melancholy has become an element in a tale of treatment interrupted.

It is not only medicine that maintains well-being. Once we function competently, the world may pitch in.