{"author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison","total_quotes":37,"quotes":[{"text":"Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions - depression, anger, anxiety - and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["positive","depression "],"id":8604,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["depression","manic-depression","mental-health","mental-illness"],"id":13953,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["bipolar","bipolar-disorder","depression","mania","manic","manic-depression","mental-disorder","mental-illness","psychology","psychopathology"],"id":15492,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"Composure and self-restraint were not only desirable characteristics in a woman, they were essental.As my mother put it later, it was bad enough having to worry yourself sick every time your husband went up in an airplane; now, she was being told, she was also supposed to feel responsible if his plane crashed. Anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself. The military, even more so than the rest of society, clearly put a premium on well-behaved, genteel, and even-tempered women.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["gender-roles","military"],"id":59716,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"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 short, for myself, I am a hard act to follow.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["bipolar","mania","manic","mental-illness","psychology"],"id":100412,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["bipolar","humor","mania","manic","mental-illness","psychology"],"id":113555,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["depression"],"id":122285,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["experience","mind","me "],"id":139192,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"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.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["an-unquiet-mind","anxiety","depression","kay-redfield-jamison","mental-illness"],"id":142334,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"},{"text":"In its severe forms, depression paralyzes all of the otherwise vital forces that make us human, leaving instead a bleak, despairing, desperate, and deadened state. . .Life is bloodless, pulseless, and yet present enough to allow a suffocating horror and pain. All bearings are lost; all things are dark and drained of feeling. The slippage into futility is first gradual, then utter. Thought, which is as pervasively affected by depression as mood, is morbid, confused, and stuporous. It is also vacillating, ruminative, indecisive, and self-castigating. The body is bone-weary; there is no will; nothing is that is not an effort, and nothing at all seems worth it. Sleep is fragmented, elusive, or all-consuming. Like an unstable, gas, an irritable exhaustion seeps into every crevice of thought and action.","author":"Kay Redfield Jamison","tags":["depression"],"id":154251,"author_id":"Kay+Redfield+Jamison"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":37,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}