The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind Quotes

“You must be your own advocate... You can't rely solely on your doctors or you family or anyone else; you have to stay on top of your own care, no matter how sick or exhausted you feel. Learn everything you can about your disease and your diagnosis, locate the very best doctors, find out exactly what drugs and treatments your doctors are giving you and what they're supposed to do, never stop researching and asking questions, and check, check, check what the doctors tell you-get second and third opinions. All of this is up to you because ultimately no one else-not your family members who love you, or your doctors, who want you to survive-is responsible for your health. You need a support team, of course, but in the end, you run this race on your own.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“We are all broken, that’s how the light gets in.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Of the roughly 800,000 people worldwide who die each year by suicide—41,000 in the United States alone—90 percent suffer from mental illness.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Emotions, which form the foundations of our personalities, are not contained in a single brain region, as once believed, but rather are distributed throughout the brain in a complex network that we don’t yet fully understand.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“An evolutionarily primitive part of the brain, the hippocampus stores long-term memories. It also works like a GPS, enabling spatial navigation so we know where we are.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Since the mid-1990s, the focus of research in mental illness has shifted from psychological studies, which analyze behaviors, to genetics and the study of chemicals in the brain (DNA, RNA, and proteins).”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Today, this theory has been soundly discredited. Schizophrenia, we now know, is a disease caused by abnormal brain structure and function, just as heart disease is a product of faulty arteries. The difference is that we don’t yet have a “brain fingerprint” for schizophrenia.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“There is no way to know from looking at it with the naked eye. The brain does not reveal its secrets easily.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“and, most striking, why I failed to notice any of these insidious changes in myself. Even as my mind was deteriorating, I couldn’t see that I was slipping into mental illness.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“In this race, I’m not rushing to the finish line because there isn’t one. There are no medals or trophies to earn, no accolades, no cheering. There is only the deep satisfaction of another day lived, another day with the people I love.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Until quite recently, psychiatrists believed that schizophrenia was a psychological illness caused by stress and upbringing, particularly by the influence of a "schizophrenogenic mother" who did not provide her child with enough maternal warmth and care. Today, this theory has been soundly discredited. Schizophrenia, as we now know, is a disease caused by abnormal brain structure and function, just as heart disease is a product of faulty arteries.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“People with damage to their frontal lobe-whether as a result of head trauma... cancer... or a neurodegenerative disease, as with Alzheimer's patients-often undergo significant personality changes. In some cases, these changes are truly bizarre, combining noticeable disinhibition with little appreciation or concern about the consequences of one's actions.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“mental”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“About a third of these brains come from suicides. That desperate and heartbreaking act is the ultimate cost for so many people who suffer from mental illness, and my colleagues and I are reminded of this grim fact each and every day.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“something is terribly wrong. But a moment later, the unpleasant thought simply slips through the cracks of my broken mind and is gone. I am a neuroscientist. For my entire career, I have studied”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Ich hoffe, dass meine persönliche Erfahrung wenigstens Zu der Erkenntnis beiträgt, dass psychisch kranke Menschen ebenso wenig für ihre Krankheit verantwortlich sind wie Krebskranke und dass die beste Reaktion auf eine psychische Erkrankung in Mitgefühl und einem noch größeren Engagement bei der Suche nach Behandlungsmethoden besteht.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, Die Hirnforscherin, die den Verstand verlor: Was mich mein Hirntumor über das Wesen der menschlichen Persönlichkeit lehrte. Die Geschichte einer unglaublichen Heilung

“My extreme reaction to sensory overload is common in people with brain trauma, autism, and many other brain conditions.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“When a person suddenly breaks normal social rules, as I’m doing now, it’s a strong indication that the frontal lobe is not working properly.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“Feelings of suspicion—sometimes rising to the level of paranoia—can be a symptom of many types of mental illness, including Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s patients may accuse their romantic partners of cheating on them or their caretakers of stealing property or trying to harm or even kill them. While neuroscientists don’t really understand the networks or parts of the brain related to paranoia, in some cases this condition is attributed to temporal lobe damage.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“About 50 percent of people with schizophrenia and 40 percent with bipolar disorder cannot understand that they are sick, so they have no real awareness of their condition and won’t accept their diagnoses.”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery

“This inability to recognize my own impairment is often observed in people with mental disorders. Known as anosognosia, or lack of insight, it’s a feature of many neurological and psychiatric conditions”
― Barbara K. Lipska, The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind: My Tale of Madness and Recovery