Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes & Sayings

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again. — Kay Redfield Jamison

He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When I am high I couldn't worry about money of I tried. So I don't. The money will come from from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81) — Kay Redfield Jamison

I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I occasionally laugh and tell him that his imperturbability is worth three hundred milligrams of lithium a day to me, and it is probably true. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Grief is so human, and it hits everyone at one point or another, at least, in their lives. If you love, you will grieve, and that's just given. — Kay Redfield Jamison

You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I realized that it was not that I didn't want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn't know why I wanted to go on — Kay Redfield Jamison

It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I read it as if it had been written by someone else, although it was my own experience being recounted.

The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. "Maniac-depressive illness." I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts in his land and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun, — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mood disorders are terribly painful illnesses, and they are isolating illnesses. And they make people feel terrible about themselves when, in fact, they can be treated. — Kay Redfield Jamison

During the Renaissance there was a renewed interest in the relationship between genius, melancholia, and madness. A stronger distinction was made between sane melancholies of high achievement and individuals whose insanity prevented them from using their ability. The eighteenth century witnessed a sharp change in attitude; balance and rational thought, rather than "inspiration" and emotional extremes, were seen as the primary components of genius. — Kay Redfield Jamison

[The] persevering steadiness of my mother, her belief in seeing things through, and her great ability to love and learn, listen and change, helped keep me alive through all the years of pain and nightmare that were to come. She could not have known how difficult it would be to deal with madness; had no preparation for what to do with madness
none of us did
but consistent with her ability to love, and her native will, she handled it with empathy and intelligence. It never occurred to her to give up. — Kay Redfield Jamison

lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can't tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treasure this part of me; whoever loves me loves me with this in it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness - to the individual himself and to others - and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides — Kay Redfield Jamison

I say I'm an academic: a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. And I write. — Kay Redfield Jamison

A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Time does not heal,
It makes a half-stitched scar
That can be broken and again you feel
Grief as total as in its first hour.
-Elizabeth Jennings — Kay Redfield Jamison

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it, an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in the wonderful moment of the sherry afterward, admission into a very old club, parties of celebration, doctoral gowns, academic rituals, and hearing for the first time "Dr.," rather than "Miss" Jamison. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide. — Kay Redfield Jamison

If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Look to the living, love them, and hold on. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There are a lot of studies that suggest a higher rate of creativity in bipolars than the general population. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was one i should willingly give up ... moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt ... even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn't in me. — Kay Redfield Jamison

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mania is as bad as it gets. If not treated, it will become worse, more frequent, and harder to treat. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief is probably not the most effective way of looking at it. I mean, at the end of the day, people suffer enormously, and you want to treat it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn't say that kept me alive; all the compassion and wamrth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Far too many doctors-many of them excellent physicians-commit suicide each year; one recent study concluded that, until quite recently, the United States lost annually the equivalent of a medium-sized medical school class from suicide alone. Most physician suicides are due to depression or manic-depressive illness, both of which are eminently treatable. Physicians, unfortunately, not only suffer from a higher rate of mood disorders than the general population, they also have a greater access to very effective means of suicide. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as "succesful" and "unsuccesful" to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who "fail" at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompeent incapable even of getting their dying quite right. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus. — Kay Redfield Jamison

People are more impulsive and they get slightly less impulsive as they get older and the impulsiveness interacting with the depression is particularly devastating and lethal, potentially lethal. — Kay Redfield Jamison

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable — Kay Redfield Jamison

From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression; depression remains under treated. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn't imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else. — Kay Redfield Jamison

People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through, and it really helps you out. At the end of the day, it gets you through because you have to reform your relationship, and you have to figure out a way of getting to the future. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers ... Restlessness and discontent are vital things ... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do. — Kay Redfield Jamison

How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would have got used to it, but I didn't know this at the time. All I knew, was that memory had given pleasure first, then cracking pain. — Kay Redfield Jamison

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise
and inexplicably
to be envied. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide is not a blot on anyone's name; it is a tragedy — Kay Redfield Jamison

But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I am one of millions who have been treated for depression and gotten well; I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist well versed in using lithium and knowledgeable about my illness, and who was also an excellent psychotherapist. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our argument here-"sharpened and unusually creative thinking" and "increased productivity"? — Kay Redfield Jamison

Often, people want both to live and to die; ambivalence saturates the suicidal act. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews - nothing, I suppose, ever could for me - but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back, my belief in love. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74) — Kay Redfield Jamison

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Time will pass; these mood will pass; and I will, eventually, be myself again. But then, at some unknown time, the electrifying carnival will come back into my mind. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun. — Kay Redfield Jamison

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no ... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated ... — Kay Redfield Jamison

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less intense emotions can never do. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I never again looked at the sky and saw only vastness and beauty. From that afternoon on I saw that death was also and always there. — Kay Redfield Jamison

God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Lower dose, which, like the building codes in California that are designed to prevent damage from earthquakes, allowed my mind and emotions to sway a bit. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Moods are by nature compelling, contagious, and profoundly interpersonal, and disorders of mood alter the perceptions and behaviors not only of those who have them but also of those who are related or closely associated. Manic-depressive illness - marked as it is by extraordinary and confusing fluctuations in mood, personality, thinking, and behavior - inevitably has powerful and often painful effects on relationships. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders. — Kay Redfield Jamison

We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Without science, there would be no such hope. — Kay Redfield Jamison

We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Others, the subject of this book, are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a "touch of fire," for what it has been through. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness — Kay Redfield Jamison

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Depression affects not only mood but the nature and content of thought as well. Thinking processes almost always slow down, and decisiveness is replaced by indecision and rumination. The ability to concentrate is usually greatly impaired and willful action and thought become difficult if not impossible. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree. There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to cause, that madness does not have. I know madness well, but I understood little of grief and I was not always certain which was grief and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires has its own territory. — Kay Redfield Jamison

One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life. — Kay Redfield Jamison