Top 100 Kay Redfield Quotes
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can't describe to anybody. So it's an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#5. Seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#6. 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
#7. Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#11. We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#27. Mania is as bad as it gets. If not treated, it will become worse, more frequent, and harder to treat.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#28. Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#29. Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
Kay Redfield Jamison
#30. 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
#32. Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmented first into phrases and then words; finally, only sounds remained.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#37. 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
#38. 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
#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. Violence, especially if you are a woman, is not something spoken about with ease.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#48. 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
#49. Suicide Note:
The calm,
Cool face of the river
Asked me for a kiss.
-Langston Hughes
Kay Redfield Jamison
#50. Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#51. 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
#52. 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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#53. Most people don't have the advantage of being able to evaluate their doctor in advance.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#54. 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
#56. 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
#57. The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#58. 'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. 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
#63. I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#65. 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
#66. Patient sees [lithium] medication as a promise of a cure, and a means of suicide if it doesn't work. She fears that by taking it she will risk her last resort
Kay Redfield Jamison
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others;
Kay Redfield Jamison
#70. Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If
Kay Redfield Jamison
#76. One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#78. Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#79. 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
#80. There are a lot of studies that suggest a higher rate of creativity in bipolars than the general population.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#85. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Now I had no choice but to live in the broken world that my mind had forced upon me.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#95. 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
#98. 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
#100. Th Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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