251 Quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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.

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who ‘fail’ at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.

The great imaginative artists have always sailed “in the wind’s eye,” and brought back with them words or sounds or images to “counterbalance human woes.” That they themselves were subject to more than their fair share of these woes deserves our appreciation, understanding, and very careful thought.

Madness is easy to overdramatize and thereby underestimate; it is less easy to convey its capacity to erode identity, disfigure love, and violate trust. The real horror of madness is more subtle and corrosive than its caricature.

Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out.

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.

Often, people want both to live and to die; ambivalence saturates the suicidal act.

I think people don’t understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.

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.