Top 100 Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes
#1. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If
Kay Redfield Jamison
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others;
Kay Redfield Jamison
#6. 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
#7. One of things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don't have prior awareness, you don't have any idea what hit you.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#8. Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#9. I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#15. I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
Kay Redfield Jamison
#17. 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
#18. Most people don't have the advantage of being able to evaluate their doctor in advance.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#19. Th Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#21. I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write ...
Kay Redfield Jamison
#24. I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#25. Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#26. 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
#27. Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#28. 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
#29. It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#31. 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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#32. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#33. 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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#34. 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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#35. There are a lot of studies that suggest a higher rate of creativity in bipolars than the general population.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#36. 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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#37. Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#39. I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#40. 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
#42. 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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this
through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#47. We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#48. If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
Kay Redfield Jamison
#49. 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
#50. When energy is profoundly dissipated, the ability to think is clearly eroded, and the capacity to actively engage in the efforts and pleasures of life is fundamentally altered, then depression becomes an illness rather than a temporary or existential state.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#52. 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
#53. We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#54. I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#55. 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
#56. Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#57. You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but you will be soon,' but you know you won't.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#58. Seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#66. Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#67. 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
#68. One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#73. Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
Kay Redfield Jamison
#74. Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#75. 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
#76. There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#77. Mania can be as terrifying as it gets. It is certainly as insane as one gets and so it's frightening when it gets out of control, but there are periods of mania when it can be extremely attractive.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#88. 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
#89. I say I'm an academic: a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. And I write.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#90. The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#91. Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#92. I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#93. I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind qas off chasing rabbits in a thousand directions.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#94. 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
#95. 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
#98. Tumultuouness,if coupled to discipline and cool mind,is not such a bad sort of thing.That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life,one ought to terms with one's darker side ad one's darker energies
Kay Redfield Jamison
#99. There is always a part
of my mind that is
preparing for the worst,
and another part of my
mind that believes if I
prepare enough for it, the worst won't
happen.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#100. Often, people want both to live and to die; ambivalence saturates the suicidal act.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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