Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

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

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.

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

I think one thing is that anybody who‘s had to contend with mental illness – whether it’s depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever – actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they’ve had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.

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

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

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.

When public figures remain silent about depression, there is a cost to the rest of society. Silence contributes to the misperception that successful people do not get depressed, and it keeps the public from seeing that treatment allows many individuals to return to competitive professional lives.

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.

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they’re better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn’t work that way.

We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.

With grief, you have reason to despair; it’s a human thing.

Nothing good comes out of depression.

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I say I’m an academic: a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. And I write.

‘An Unquiet Mind’ wasn’t hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.

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.

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

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.