Quotes from Kay Redfield Jamison

It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than as being willful, angry, irrational, or simply tiresome.

Eventually, the depression went away of its own accord, but only long enough for it to regroup and mobilize for the next attack.

This was not why I had gotten a Ph.D., and I was beginning to understand Bob Dylans lines "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift." Only it was twenty-three years, and I was still pulling a lot of night shift as well.

It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven't understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person's world.

but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods. I miss the lost intensities, and I find myself unconsciously reaching out for them, as I still now and again reach back with

Now and again she would break in with "Yes, yes, that's very interesting," "Of course you can," or "Had you thought of …?" Never, but never, was there an "I don't think that's very practical" or "Why don't you just wait and see how it goes?

He, like my father, had a deep love for natural science, and he would discuss at length how physics, philosophy, and mathematics were, each in their own ways, jealous mistresses who required absolute passion and attention.

In a state of exuberance, judgment is put on hold-but is not turned off completely. In hypomania judgment is napping, but still wakes up periodically to check things out. In mania, judgment is out like a light.

Navy Cotillion was where officers' children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn, as if the preceding fourteen or fifteen years hadn't already made it painfully clear, that generals outrank colonels who, in turn, outrank majors and captains and lieutenants, and everyone, but everyone, outranks children. Within the ranks of children, boys always outrank girls.

He was low-key, I was intense; things that cut me to the quick he was able to sail by with scarcely a notice; he was slow to anger, I quick; the world registered gently upon him, sometimes not at all, whereas I was fast to feel both pleasure and pain.

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no—and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I suppose I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated.

am reminded of Byron's wonderful description of the rainbow that sits "Like Hope upon a death-bed" on the verge of a wild, rushing cataract; yet, "while all around is torn / By the distracted waters," the rainbow stays serene: Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.

But, as I well knew, an understanding at an abstract level does not necessarily translate into an understanding at a day-to-day level. I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it.

Two other patients were waiting for their doctors, which only added to my sense of indignity and embarrassment at finding myself with the roles reversed--character building, no doubt, but I was beginning to tire or all the opportunities to build character at the expense of peace, predictability, and a normal life.

In the bipolar patients we have studied, there is a significantly increased number of small areas of focal signal hyperintensities [areas of increased water concentration] suggestive of abnormal tissue. These are what neurologists sometimes refer to as 'unidentified bright objects,' or UBOs.

Within psychiatric circles, if you kill yourself, you earn the right to be considered a "successful" suicide. This is a success one can live without.

I also started giving Christmas lectures to the house staff and clinic staff that focused on music written by composers who had experienced severe depression or manic-depressive illness. These informal lectures became the basis for a concert that a friend of mine, a professor of music at UCLA, and I subsequently produced in 1985 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In an attempt to raise public awareness about mental illness

Reading, which had been at the heart of my intellectual and emotional existence, was suddenly beyond my grasp. I was used to reading three or four books a week; now it was impossible. I did not read a serious work of literature or nonfiction, cover to cover, for more than ten years. The frustration and pain of this were immeasurable.

There were, however, definite advantages to studying invertebrate zoology. For starters, unlike in psychology, you could eat your subjects. The lobsters—fresh from the sea and delicious—were especially popular.

He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we have been together have I doubted Richard's love for me, nor mine for him. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.

It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.

Far more important, they took me and my interests very seriously. They never tried to discourage me from becoming a doctor, even though it was an era that breathed, If woman, be a nurse.

For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods. Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, first severely depressed as an adolescent, and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods.

For as long as I can remember, I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods.