251 Quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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.

It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.

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.

Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell puts it, “with one skin-layer missing.

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete.

We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities.

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.

Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others”;.

Americans really believe that the past is past,” he writes. “They do not care to know that the past soaks the present like the light of a distant star. Things that are over do not end. They come inside us, and seek sanctuary in subjectivity. And there they live on, in the consciousness of individuals and communities.” The forward thrust of exuberance, like closure, risks leaving behind an essential past.