251 Quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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.

I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.

We have given sorrow many words, but a passion for life few.

Moods are by nature compelling, contagious, and profoundly interpersonal, and disorders of mood alter the perceptions and behaviors not only of those who have them but also of those who are related or closely associated. Manic-depressive illness – marked as it is by extraordinary and confusing fluctuations in mood, personality, thinking, and behavior – inevitably has powerful and often painful effects on relationships.

Part of my stubbornness can be put down to human nature. It is hard for anyone with an illness, chronic or acute, to take medications absolutely as prescribed. Once symptoms of an illness go away, it becomes even more difficult.

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?

Because the privacy of my nightmare had been of my own designing, no one close to me had any real idea of the psychological company I had been keeping.

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.

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.