Quotes from Kay Redfield Jamison

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.

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.

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.

It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.

Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.

Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so.

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.

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

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

With grief, you have reason to despair; it's a human thing.

People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It's hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do.

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

...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

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through, and it really helps you out. At the end of the day, it gets you through because you have to reform your relationship, and you have to figure out a way of getting to the future.

Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that's just given.

Mania is as bad as it gets. If not treated, it will become worse, more frequent, and harder to treat.

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

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

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.

There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.

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

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

Look to the living, love them, and hold on.