"I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships."

I devoured this entire book in one day. You should do the same.

Jamison tackles not only the absolute horrors that come with manic-depressive illness (she prefers that term to "bipolar"), but also its advantages and beautiful intensity, which one must honestly evaluate in order to understand the resistance to treatment. There is a distinct advantage that is conferred onto a clinician who's suffered from the disease she studies, some personal experience that a lifetime of reading could never confer. I've interacted with enough mental health professionals who flatly pathologize, who force people into a rigid hierarchy of "normal" and "ill," to know that we have enough of those already. Bring on the crazy therapists; I'd prefer them to the cold, detached ones with stiff-backed chairs. They are perhaps the only people in the world who can navigate that delicate balance of controlling the pathological elements of one's personality without pathologizing the personality itself.