Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes about Pain

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

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. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Wall, Pain, Sadness

FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from May 17, 2014

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

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine equivalent to ease the acute pain, and death, not uncommonly, is violent and grisly. The suffering of a suicidal is private and inexpressible, leaving family members, friends and colleagues to deal with an almost unfathomable kind of loss, as well as guilt. Suicide carries in its aftermath a level of confusion and devastation that is, for the most part, beyond description.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide, Pain, Suicidal

Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.24, Vintage

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness

Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide, Pain, Motivation

FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Feb 18, 2013

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

Pain, Feels Just, Kind

Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. September 30, 2009.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Pain, Loneliness, Reality

Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.45, Pan Macmillan

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths

Kay Redfield Jamison

Suicide, Pain, Reality

Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.310, Vintage