Quotes from Kay Redfield Jamison

Because the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping.

Th Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.

I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.

Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water. I

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.

Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: "To be sure," wrote Hugo Wolf, "I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.

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.

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

Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others";

my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally

During the Renaissance there was a renewed interest in the relationship between genius, melancholia, and madness. A stronger distinction was made between sane melancholies of high achievement and individuals whose insanity prevented them from using their ability. The eighteenth century witnessed a sharp change in attitude; balance and rational thought, rather than "inspiration" and emotional extremes, were seen as the primary components of genius.

We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few.

Mental exhaustion had taken a long, terrible toll, but, strangely, it was only in feeling well, energetic, and high-spirited again that I had any true sense of the toll taken.

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..... But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so abstract as one might have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow.

lower dose, which, like the building codes in California that are designed to prevent damage from earthquakes, allowed my mind and emotions to sway a bit.

Patient sees [lithium] medication as a promise of a cure, and a means of suicide if it doesn't work. She fears that by taking it she will risk her last resort

The simultaneous existence and shared residence of such opposite moods and feelings is well-illustrated by Franz Schubert's assertion that whenever he sat down to write songs of love he wrote songs of pain, and whenever he sat down to write songs of pain he wrote songs of love.

My thoughts were so fast that I couldn't remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through.

As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling.

There is no easy way to tell other people that you have manic-depressive illness; if there is, I haven't found it.

We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods.

Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nor beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both.