Quotes from Kay Redfield Jamison

An exuberant temperature by no means leads inevitably, or even usually, to shallowness, but the potential is there. Subtleties and sustained thought can be lost in a swirl of vivacious moods and energies, just as monomaniacal enthusiasm can limit awareness of and sensitivity to the perspective, needs, and contributions of other people.

and increased energy)

I have plotted Lombroso's findings in figure 4-3, and it can be seen that he found peaks of productivity in the late spring and early fall.

Her version of Lowell was not theirs, even when they were discussing the same symptoms; what to her was "mad" was to them another mark of Lowell's genius.

He was twenty years old when he left New England. By the age of thirty he had exchanged Protestantism for Catholicism, anonymity for literary acclaim, and sanity for madness.

It is well that war is so terrible: we should grow too fond of it.

Suicide, dangerously, has a contagious aspect; it has, as well, for the vulnerable, an indisputable appeal as the solution of last resort.

Among the Yuit Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island, if an individual requested suicide three times, relatives were obligated to assist in the killing. The person seeking suicide dressed in ritual death garb and then was killed in a "destroying place" set aside specifically for that purpose. To save commonly held resources of food or to allow a nomadic society to move on unhindered by the physically ill or elderly, some societies gave tacit if not explicit approval to suicide.

In one study carried out in Australia, for instance, 40 percent of those who acknowledged thinking about suicide at one point in their lives, when asked the same questions four years later denied ever having had such thoughts.

Suicide, it can be seen, is the second major killer of women in this age group and the fourth major killer of men. By any standards, suicide is a critical public health problem.

They can try acupuncture, they can try ECT, they can try a frontal lobotomy, none of it will work. I am a hopeless case. I have lost my angel. I have lost my mind. The days are too long, too heavy; my bones are crushing under the weight of these days.

Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness. American artist Ralph Barton tried to explain this in his suicide note:

Disconcertingly, one of the highest-risk periods for suicide is when patients are actually recovering from depression.

The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to clear and compelling description.

Brian imaging studies conducted while a person is listening to music show that there are increases in cerebral blood flow in the same reward areas of the brain that are active when food, sex, or highly addictive drugs are involved. (Music may also, like other inducers of positive mood, decrease activity in those regions of the brain associated with negative emotions, such as anxiety or revulsion.)

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.

The merrier the heart, alleged Burton, the longer the life. Modern science tends to support his contention: positive emotions such as joy act as breathers from stress and in doing so they help to restore physical and psychological health after draining or stressful times.

On the one hand, it was exhilarating to be around so many smart and competitive students; on the other hand, it was new, humiliating, and very discouraging. It was not easy to have to acknowledge my very real limitations in background and ability.

I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.

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

We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.

Nothing good comes out of depression.

You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.

I think one thing is that anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.