Mental Quotes

“Mary Karr once wrote, “In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“For mental health coverage and the study of it to advance at all, physical health needs to be regarded as something that encompasses both body and mind. Angst and his holistic approach to psychiatric health remain the gold standard. But health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industrial complex don’t seem remotely interested in pursuing a health care system that would actually contribute to overall health. In fact, the labyrinthine process for reimbursement, coverage, rules, and regulations for both doctors and patients amplifies mental illness and anxiety. Every time I’m put on hold or puzzle through a pharmaceutical query, my back tightens, my jaw locks, and I have to calm myself down and coach myself through it. Most of the time I give up.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Many therapists—psychiatrists, psychologists, and those in behavioral health—won’t take private insurance, exchange plans, or Medicaid plans because they don’t pay providers well, which means outpatient care is still an issue. Covered treatment becomes an emergency room issue and is reactionary rather than preventive. And, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in our contemporary mental health crisis, people are more likely to encounter police than get medical help. “As a result, 2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails each year. Nearly 15 percent of men and 30 percent of women booked into jails have a serious mental health condition.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“In 2008 when George W. Bush signed the Mental Health Parity Act into law, it required all insurers to cover behavioral health the same way plans covered any other type of medical treatment; but insurance companies found loopholes and ways to circumvent coverage. Years later, when Obamacare was implemented, in a significant move toward parity, it forbade health plans from rejecting people with preexisting conditions—including mental illness and addiction. “We have made progress expanding mental health coverage and elevating the conversation about mental health,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “But too many people still do not get the help they need.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“What’s happened is that most psychiatrists have no clue that ER is better than DR, and many prescribe generic DR. And because it’s been off-patent for several years there’s no economic incentive to educate doctors on how to use Depakote effectively.” He explained that Abbott launched Depakote DR first and Depakote ER second. He said most psychiatrists were just unaware of Depakote ER’s improvements over the first formulation. It lessened the side effects and made the pill easier to tolerate. But Schwartz had prescribed ER and yet the pharmacy doled out DR? Sometimes, that happens for insurance reasons, sometimes it’s just a lack of information, sometimes it’s a mistake, he said.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“There were relatively few options left for me. I am a classic case of bipolar 1 with symptoms that are primarily expressed as mania as opposed to depression. Most of the other medications used to treat bipolar disorder are geared toward bipolar 2, which leans more toward depression than mania. Lamictal, Seroquel, Abilify won’t stop the manic.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Being on the mild end of the spectrum of bipolar allows for this kind of wishful thinking. “The diagnosis is a label, directions for treatment,” Angst said. “But the whole human being, the patient himself is a whole complexity of other phenomena which has to be taken into account. He has to be considered as a whole.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I asked Angst what he thought drove that special kind of creativity, and he said something I had heard before: “You are deviant in your thinking, you leave that normal pathway to jump somewhere else in your thoughts, and that is creative. Being unconventional in your emotional jumps, you go away from the usual in a positive sense.” In Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote about how Robert Lowell’s madness was inspiration for his poetry and then later braided his experiences into his work when he was lucid enough to actually write.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Hippocrates urged physicians to make frequent visits with their patients and directly inquire about their situations without intermediaries, laypersons, or nurses interfering. This effort was to inspire confidence among patients so that they would feel comfortable trusting their doctors. Because once again, how do you know if medication is working in mental illness? You don’t, you only know when it’s not working.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“even if you could measure mental illness, you couldn’t define normal based on statistics. An individual is much more complex.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“said. We talked about how we have ways of measuring the heart, blood pressure, ways to map the body with numbers and guidelines—I explained that from my experience it seemed like tracking mood was impossible. Dr. Angst countered that he and others had developed a series of questions—the Hypomania Checklist, a thirty-two-question self-assessment survey. I thought back to my adolescent self-assessment and was wary. If you are manic, you are likely to answer delusionally. And what could a survey really show? And that seemed to be the crux of why treatment is so hard—there’s no way for a doctor, especially a doctor just meeting a patient for the first time, to be able to identify what is manic for one person versus manic for another. For all Dr. Angst knew, I was not a writer, not working on a book at all, and that I was in the throes of an episode, interviewing experts as part of a manic episode. And maybe I was? I was eating barrels full of pasta, talking to random strangers, and I was here for a slightly bizarre and complicated purpose, almost grandiose.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“When he was young, Angst picked up his father’s entomology hobby, and noticed that butterflies that came from different altitudes had different wing patterns. He experimented by taking low-altitude butterfly larvae and birthing them in freezing temperatures in the refrigerators of the city slaughterhouse. The result: a high-altitude wing pattern. That was the beginning of his belief that health—including mental health—was a holistic issue, affected by environmental factors that shifted the expression of genes.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I’m not sure what I thought I could absorb from sitting there on yellowed grass and in minimal shade—a return to a Roman time when melancholia and mania was first thought of and considered? Or just a sense of the reliance and importance that this society once placed on relaxation? It used to be a sign of empirical strength to be able to build such an enormous and architecturally complicated complex devoted to leisure, to calming the mind.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Bad Kissingen was just one of many spa towns in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century. In an October issue of the Lancet from 1894, a doctor examined the effects of lithium-rich waters in the Welsh region of Llangammarch, concluding that the water was certainly therapeutic, if not curative for a variety of illnesses. At the turn of the century therapeutic waters were all the rage.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“In 2014, Dr. Anna Fels wrote an op-ed titled “Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?” for the New York Times. And sometimes I think, yes, we should. There would be less aggression, suicide, and a calmer state of mind. Some experts have heralded lithium as the next fluoride, especially after scientists found that suicide rates were lower in areas where the drinking water had higher concentrations of the element. In the October 4, 1971, issue of the New York Times Magazine, a feature was published called “The Texas Tranquilizer,” in which University of Texas biochemist Earl B. Dawson claimed that El Paso had lower rates of suicide and crime and fewer admissions to mental hospitals than Dallas because their water supply was heavily laced with lithium. For”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Fraulein Löwinsky took possession of herself.” Else, like many others, committed suicide. It was hard not to look at the buildings, the properties, the places she had been and be struck with sadness. I wanted to cry. But Dobie was so gracious and on track and helpful; no need to deal with a sobbing American coming to terms with genocide. I wondered if Else suffered from mental illness before the war or because of it. War, it seemed, was a collective mental illness. We are never not at war—with each other or with ourselves.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Researchers now have come close to identifying why lithium functions as a mood stabilizer—it affects the levels of serotonin that act as a messenger regulating aspects of the nervous system such as sleep, memory, appetite, mood, sex, endocrine function. And studies have found that when lithium is prescribed chronically (for more than three weeks), the increase in serotonin is focused in the hippocampus rather than scattered all over the brain.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“It’s also thought that mineral springs in France have unnaturally high amounts of lithium. More lithium in the waters, less need to medicate people because they’re getting small doses every day. Lithium may be the true reason why the French can sit in cafés for hours, eat cheese, and sip coffee slowly. They may, in fact, have a natural lithium chill embedded in their geography.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“An estimated 50 percent of the world’s lithium supply lies beneath the Salar de Uyuni in southern Bolivia. The increasing global demand for lithium has prompted many proclamations, including claims by Bolivians that the landlocked socialist country will become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” The danger of relying on any natural resource for national income is known as the “resource curse.” It seems like an almost too easy and obvious parallel to my dependence on lithium.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Lithium allowed me to function, but during this breakdown, breakup, or whatever was happening, Noodle Pudding saved me. The food, the people, the wine, and having a place to go cannot be underrated in the realm of treatment. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben writes about how forests act as a family, pooling resources and protecting each other, sending messages and nutrients through an elaborate roots system. Noodle Pudding was like that—a forest made of pasta. I lived alone, Randy (a regular who lived upstairs) lived alone, Fredo seemed alone in this world, alone in his kitchen. There were times when the isolation felt awful. But at Noodle Pudding, we were alone together.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“The Merck Manual defines Bipolar I as manic patients who are “inexhaustibly, excessively, and impulsively involved in various pleasurable, high-risk activities (e.g., gambling, dangerous sports, promiscuous sexual activity) without insight into possible harm. Symptoms are so severe that they impair functioning; unwise investments, spending sprees, and other personal choices may have irreparable consequences.” Yes, on all of that. This was full-blown mania, round two.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I could feel the flip from elevated, magnetic energy to agitation, scattered thoughts, distraction, obsession, anxiety.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“What actually was taking place on a more realistic level was the beginning of a two-month manic cycle. I believed everything I spouted (I am God! I am a rock star! I love you! And you!) to be true. I remembered most of it; I had no inhibitions or boundaries or fear. My family, meanwhile, was scrambling to make shit work and to make sure I didn’t accidentally set everything on fire—physically or metaphorically.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“At the turn of the century when Carl Jung entered his apprenticeship at Burghölzli, the psychiatric hospital at the University of Zürich, he wrote that his interest and research was dominated by the “burning question: ‘What actually takes place inside the mentally ill?’” I can tell you what was happening in me. I turned into a comet or a supernova, bursting, going in no particular direction, aimed at nothing but intensely moving forward on a trajectory to nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Everything was eclipsed by me. I was the sun, the moon, the solar system, the beginning of time and the end.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“The thing about mania is that all the hippie, glitter, and glow comes with an aggressive intensity that could make a planet reverse rotation. Maniacs breathe fire. I literally had started smoking a pack of American Spirits a day, having barely smoked before.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“As Sylvia Plath wrote, “When you are insane, you are busy being insane—all the time.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“He was intrigued, addicted to the mania, and devoted, following me around with his video camera, recording impromptu dance recitals and monologues. Mania or even the beginnings of mania will do this. There’s a magnetism to that kind of high, and I knew I could draw people to me. I had drawn in Mike.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“mania is more like unbridled dizzying love or the first sparkling spring day when daffodils are bursting and everything is coated in warm rays and looking like a rainbow paradise, prisms of iridescence beaming.) Being bipolar meant I had access to the other side. But there were still functional kinks to work out—living with daily tasks was sometimes a challenge.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“described PTSD to me as “someone’s stress response system or view of the world essentially hijacked, and it has to do with how memory works. PTSD is a disorder where people can’t forget, and it becomes a physiological response. There are intense feelings of horror and panic. When you bring back a memory, you are essentially experiencing it again.” There are times when my brain feels hijacked by panic and agitation, and I imagine for the women centuries and millennia before me who didn’t even have the benefit of diagnosis, it felt even worse.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“The researchers found that a history of sexual abuse is associated with an increased risk of a lifetime diagnosis of multiple psychiatric disorders and that medical literature has long reported an association between sexual abuse and psychiatric symptoms. A study published in 2016 by the British Journal of Psychiatry found that childhood traumas were linked with later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and that people who are bipolar are 2.63 times as likely to have experienced some type of abuse. What this means, in theory, is that the disease is not purely genetic; it is environmental as well.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind