quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

"If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up....moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life."
— Kay Redfield Jamison

"We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. It is also tiresome. People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed. They might think that they ought to, and they might even try, but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief: you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're "not at all like yourself but will be soon," but you know you won't."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"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."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"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"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"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 suffering and, not infrequently, suicide."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"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"
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament. It has been with my pleasure, and not-inconsiderable pain, that I have learned about the possibilities of love - its steadiness and its growth - from my husband, the man with whom I had lived for almost a decade. "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise---and inexplicably---to be envied."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness)

"Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown.’ "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings."
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)

"The awareness of the damage done by sever mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides "
— Kay Redfield Jamison (Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide)