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Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes about Depression

All Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes Awareness Bipolar Choices Confusion Depression quotes Desire Energy Grief Illness Loss Pain Passion Reality Sadness
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars....But, somewhere,

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars....But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable....It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Kay Redfield Jamison
Depression, Stars, Pain

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.

Kay Redfield Jamison
Depression, Jobs, Divorce
Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.133, Pan Macmillan

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
Depression, Pain, Dark
FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Jan 11, 2012

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
Depression, Writing, Thinking

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
Depression, Wall, Sadness
FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Dec 20, 2010

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
Sad, Depression, Moving
FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from May 29, 2011

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
Depression, Giving Up, Believe

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
Depression, Mother, Horse

But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. 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
Depression, Loss, Luxury
Frederick K. Goodwin, Kay Redfield Jamison (2007). “Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression”, p.40, Oxford University Press

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