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None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick. At my best I have islands of being sick.
Art is lunging forward without certainty about where you are going or how to get there, being open to and dependent on what luck, the paint, the typo, the dissonance, give you. Without art you’re stuck with yourself as you are and life as you think life is.
If we’re lucky enough to get better, we have to deal with people who seem unaware of our heroism and who treat us as if we are just mentally ill.
The reason creativity and craziness go together is that if you’re just plain crazy without being able to sing or dance or write good poems, no one is going to want to have babies with you. Your genes will fall by the wayside. Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?
Life for the unwell is discontinuous and unpredictable. Things just come out of nowhere. People try but mostly do a lousy job of taking care of you.
I grew up thinking everything would be perfect if we just had a little more money. Instead the money just blew everything apart. Humans will money themselves to death the same way some dogs and fish will eat themselves to death. If the rich were truly so productive and useful, they wouldn’t have so many hired-gun talking heads with talking points, foundations, and institutes. Eventually most kings come to believe in the divine right of kings.
A psychotic break is the exact opposite of not taking up much space and being as little trouble as possible.
Maybe it was all in my head, but where else is there for anything to be? As the person who bargained God down from nuclear cataclysm to a relatively mild earthquake and stopped Kurt Vonnegut from killing himself, and got to meet all those guys, it was a hard thing to come back to earth and be just a regular mental patient.
you take good care of any disease by eating well, sleeping well, being aware of your health, consciously wanting to be well, not smoking, et cetera, you are doing all the same things you should be doing anyway, but somehow having a disease makes them easier to do. A human without a disease is like a ship without a rudder.
Having a not entirely reasonable expectation that things will go well turns out to be exactly the sort of delusion that increases your chances for success in this world, be it getting into medical school or whatever. If in fact you are skating on thin ice, the last thing you want to do is slow down and think about it.
The thing that keeps the gambler gambling is the illusion that he has control, special knowledge that will make him come out on top. If the gambler comes to believe that he is up against a random number generator and that what he once thought of as special knowledge is worthless, he stops gambling. What keeps the drinker drinking is the certainty that she can stop whenever she wants. It never would have occurred to me that stopping the pathetic little bit of drinking I did would have mattered.
The most arrogant outrageous thought is that there’s a point in thinking.
A small thing wrong can make a big thing go completely wrong.
Part of what happens when one goes crazy is that there’s a grammatical shift. Thoughts come into the mind as firmly established truth. There is no simile or metaphor. There’s no tense but the present. The fantastic presents itself as fact.
It’s probably possible to gain humility by means other than repeated humiliation, but repeated humiliation works very well.
Maybe I just had to learn to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, with being scared out of my mind, and to let it go past like it wasn’t about me.
God bless the moments when I felt all right.
With mental illness the trick is to not take your feelings so seriously; you’re zooming in and zooming away from things that go from being too important to being not important at all.
So I was watching my thoughts in a detached way. I could zoom in or out to see how they looked without trying to change them. If I was lucky, I might find things that could be part of how I try to tell the truth.
Alcoholism and mental illness aren’t very different and I had both. When I believed that I was well because I worked hard and made good choices … when I believed I was well because I deserved it … I was living in a shoe box. My worries were my enemies, and my best tool was my ability to hold my breath.
Ockham’s razor is useful when choosing between two theories that have the same predictions and the available data cannot distinguish between them. The razor directs us to go with the simplest of the theories. William of Ockham in the fourteenth century: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine neccesitate,” which translates as “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” chapter 11 Honduras The real root of all evil is how hard it is to do good.
A dispassionate look at all the many innovations of the insurance industry, from HMOs and managed care to co-pays and prior authorizations, would show that each innovation was a way for insurers to make money at the expense of the public good. If these innovations were studied like a new drug or medical device, they would be taken off the market.
The truth about the voices is that once you’ve heard them, they are always there, just more or less offstage and more or less intelligible.
Passing for normal hasn’t been a problem for me for a while now. I know how to dress and act and how to not exactly tell the truth about what’s going on.
The difference between me and crazy people who have not done well is not much.
There are no people anywhere who don’t have some mental illness.
The bad behavior of others constitutes an attractive nuisance to someone recovering from mental illness. You need all your energy and wits for things that matter. Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one’s family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious.
If recovery from mental illness depended on the goodness, mercy, and rational behavior of others, we’d all be screwed. Peace of mind is inversely proportional to expectations.
There was something wrong with me besides hearing voices and jumping through windows, besides schizophrenia or manic depression or schizoaffective disorder. What was wrong with me was that I couldn’t love or accept love.
The truth is, I was terrified and wouldn’t have trusted or accepted love if it came and sat in my lap—especially if it came and sat in my lap. I didn’t have the faintest idea who I was. Publishing a book, getting into medical school, and getting to be a pretty good doctor saved my life and kept me barely alive, but by the time I went crazy for the fourth and, I hope, last time, my soul was on life support.
Somehow having my awesome willpower come up short against alcohol got rid of the three-inch-thick Plexiglas separating me from the rest of the world. I can now love and accept love.
By the time he is twelve years old the average child has heard about drugs, alcohol, and unsafe sex so often that the messages are blocked before reaching consciousness. He has also been told over and over that if he works hard and gets good grades things will go well for him, which is a lie. Drugs are a way to be dead but just for a little while.
All you have to know about the power of will and choice is that most drug addicts can’t stop, even when they want to.
Childhood isn’t fun for everyone. One of the attractive things about drugs is that they give children a way to stop being a child. Bye-bye pain and fear; hello addiction.
