A First-Rate Madness Quotes

“The depressed person is mired in the past; the manic person is obsessed with the future. Both destroy the present in the process.”
― Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“King and Gandhi had found a way to use aggressive impulses to resist injustice without hurting others. Where did the aggression go? The answer, as King would later tell Poussaint, was this: into the courage needed to resist without fighting back physically...”
― Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“In times of crisis, we are better off being led by mentally ill leaders than by mentally normal ones.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“The American Civil War lays out the stark contrast: the greatest generals in war are often abundant failures during peacetime, and vice versa. McClellan and Sherman are the sharpest contrasts; but there is also Grant the peacetime drunkard, and Stonewall Jackson the barely tolerable military professor. Only Lee stands out as effective in both peace and war (and even he had a mentally unstable father, and himself may have been dysthymic in his general personality). This conflict reflects, I think, the different psychological qualities of leadership needed in different phases of human activity, peace and war being the two extremes.”
― Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“The Jewish philosopher Maimonides once said that if one can only learn to say, “I don’t know,” he will prosper.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“MOST OF US make a basic and reasonable assumption about sanity: we think it produces good results, and we believe insanity is a problem.”
― Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Contrary to popular belief, the psychiatric concept of clinical depression is different from ordinary sadness. Depression adds to sadness a constellation of physical symptoms that produce a general slowing and deadening of bodily functions. A depressive person sleeps less, and the nighttime becomes a dreaded chore that one can never achieve properly. Or one never gets out of bed; better sleep, if one can, since one can’t do anything else. Interest in life and activities declines. Thinking itself is difficult; concentration is shot; it’s hard enough to focus on three consecutive thoughts, much less read an entire book. Energy is low; constant fatigue, inexplicable and unyielding, wears one down. Food loses its taste. Or to feel better, one might eat more, perhaps to stave off boredom. The body moves slowly, falling to the declining rhythm of one’s thoughts. Or one paces anxiously, unable to relax. One feels that everything is one’s own fault; guilty, remorseful thoughts recur over and over. For some depressives, suicide can seem like the only way out of this morass; about 10 percent take their own lives.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“...if we do not know how to defend ourselves, our women and our places of worship by force of suffering, i.e., nonviolence, we must, if we are men, be at least able to defend all these by fighting." (MLK)
"...If given a choice between violent resistance and passive acceptance, King and Gandhi both accepted violence..."
"...like violence, it [non-violent resistance] was aggressive, but it was spiritually, bot physically, so."

"...At the same time the mind and the emotions are active, actively trying to persuade the opponent to change his ways and convince him that he is mistaken and to lift him to a higher level of existence.”
― Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Overall there is a “picture of an individual who would be submissive to authority, but not slavishly.” Searching for a term less loaded than “normal” to describe these people, Grinker called them homoclites, a Latinate term he invented to indicate “those who follow a common rule.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“He’s really a great gossip”—“terrifically interested” in hearing what others have to say. Even strangers got presidential attention: Kennedy would reply two hundred times per day to the thousands of daily letters he received.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Hyperthymic personality is like an innate immunity to trauma. It is a harbinger of resilience.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“resilience—“good outcomes in spite of serious threats to adaptation or development.” Resilience isn’t simply something one is born with; it grows out of an interaction between factors that promote it (like hyperthymic personality) and harmful life events—producing a good outcome in the end. In psychology research, two lines of evidence support this notion. First, when people experience harmful events, some are injured psychologically, but others are not. Second, sometimes people even get stronger after such events, a “steeling” effect that protects them against future stresses. Resilience is the mind’s vaccine.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“we sacrifice realism in the interest of happiness.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“final, and maybe the most important, aspect of creative thinking that we see in mania is the ability to think broadly; psychologists call this “integrative complexity.” Creative people see farther and wider; their cognitive peripheral vision is clearer; they make connections between seemingly disparate things that many of us miss.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“I don’t claim that depression invariably leads to realism, nor that mania always enhances creativity, nor that depression on every occasion increases empathy, nor that hyperthymia inevitably promotes resilience. Rather, I argue that, on the whole, more often than not, those mental illnesses enhance or promote those qualities more frequently than is the case in the absence of those mental illnesses. Some people with manic-depressive illness are unrealistic (even psychotic), unempathic, and unresilient. We shouldn’t romanticize this condition; in its most extreme forms, it is highly disabling and dangerous. But most people have less severe forms of these illnesses; there will be many more manic-depressive leaders showing the beneficial traits discussed in this book than manic-depressive leaders who are dangerously crazy.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Four key elements of some mental illnesses—mania and depression—appear to promote crisis leadership: realism, resilience, empathy, and creativity. These aren’t just loosely defined character traits; they have specific psychiatric meanings, and have been extensively studied scientifically. I use these terms in their scientific, not their commonsense, meanings.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Is it the same, in short, when we study nature versus when we study human beings who love, and hate, and believe, and doubt?”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“The great physician William Osler once said that all medicines are toxic; it is how they’re used that makes them therapeutic. If used in the wrong setting, in the wrong amounts, they always cause harm;”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“The perils of success: Leston Havens, a wise psychotherapist, once commented to me that he had known many people who had been improved by failure, and many ruined by success”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“TOWARD THE END of his life, broke and broken, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his daughter, who was about to go to college, in which he advised her “to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. . . . By this I mean the thing that lies behind all great careers, from Shakespeare’s to Abraham Lincoln’s, and as far back as there are books to read—the sense that life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat, and that the redeeming things are not ‘happiness and pleasure’ but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Psychiatry and psychology, in the United States, have long been infatuated with psychoanalysis. Only in the last two decades has psychoanalysis been put in its proper place—not simply discarded, but no longer seen as necessary and sufficient in itself. (Imagine if all of economics was thought to be contained in Marxism; psychiatry was that dependent on psychoanalysis until recently.) This psychoanalytic obsession has been replaced by a perspective on mental illness that is scientifically and medically sound. This psychiatry, stripped of its psychoanalytic faith, can be an extremely useful tool for historians.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“King was not depressed because he “had” the illness of depression, this colleague remarked; he was depressed because of the extreme stress of living with the danger of death daily. This may be, or it could be that he had the disease of depression, or both. This problem can’t be easily dismissed: it is a profound dilemma that has exasperated philosophers for at least three centuries, since the philosopher David Hume starkly laid out this “problem of causation.” X happens; then Y happens; X happens; then Y happens; X happens; then Y happens. At some point, we conclude that X causes Y. But as Hume points out, this idea of “cause” only means the constant conjunction of X and Y. Someday, Y might not follow X, and our assumption of cause would be proven incorrect. But we cannot know whether this will happen or not. So in the meantime, we presume causation. In sum: saying something causes something else is always a probabilistic statement; one can never be 100 percent certain. So it is with all knowledge: with philosophy, science, psychiatry, and history.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Yet there are lessons for us all in the lives of those whose depression (sometimes aided by mania) spurred them onward to a realistic sense of the world’s hazards, empathic concern for others, creative approaches to problems, and the resilience to survive and thrive. Our normal mild self-illusion often serves us well in the course of our daily lives. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, we need to aim slightly above if we wish to hit the mark. But such normal illusion also hides important realities. When the crises of daily life come, we realize that we had been living a forgetful life, unaware of some basic truths. Then some depression may help us see what has happened and what we must do. And then we might be able to meet the challenges of life, and maybe even attain some happiness in the process. Quite a paradox it is: being open to some depression may allow us, ultimately, to be less depressed.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Beforehand, many people with depressive illness persist at a mildly depressed baseline, not so severe as to diagnose a clinical “major” depressive episode, but also not completely well. Afterward, once the severe episode is over, some people have mild leftover depression, and they can become even more insightful about their lives.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Lincoln understood. “It’s my experience,” he once said, “that folks who have no vices have generally very few virtues.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Personal vices are, after all, much less of a problem than political shortcomings.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“But psychological moderation is not what marks our great presidents. Can we applaud passion, embrace anxiety, accept irritability, appreciate risk-taking, even prefer depression?”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“CHAPTER 15 STIGMA AND POLITICS We are left with a dilemma. Mental health—sanity—does not ensure good leadership; in fact, it often entails the reverse. Mental illness can produce great leaders, but if the illness is too severe, or treated with the wrong drugs, it produces failure or, sometimes, evil. The relationship between mental illness and leadership turns out to be quite complex, but it certainly isn’t consistent with the common assumption that sanity is good, and insanity bad.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“Germany and its Nazi leaders were not much different, psychologically, from any nation or any leaders. And that’s the scary part.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

“This disconcerting possibility may hold within it a dangerous wisdom about human psychology: the violence that lurks within even the healthiest of us.”
― S. Nassir Ghaemi, A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness