Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir

by Mark Vonnegut Md

You either have or don’t have a reluctance to give up on yourself. It helps a lot if others don’t give up on you.

if you’re lucky enough to survive going crazy and get back to the point where you can pass for normal, it builds a question into the rest of your life. You have to forgive people for wondering, “How all right can he be?”

The name change was an effort to get away from the stigma around the diagnosis of manic depression. Good luck.

It’s good to have a sixth gear, but watch out for the seventh one. If you think too well outside the box, you might find yourself in a little room without much in it.

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.

If you don’t have flights of ideas, why bother to think at all? I don’t see how people without loose associations and flights of ideas get much done.

Fixed delusions, fears, loss of flexibility, loss of concrete thinking, and low stress tolerance make relationships, jobs, and family next to impossible and then impossible.

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.

The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I’ve saved myself trying to be normal.

I existed without an explanation.

When I was a boy There was reason to believe That people did good things for good reasons.