Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from o...
St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years wa...
That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.
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...
When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunate...
Depression, somehow, is much more in line with society's notions of what women are all about: passive, sensitive, hopeless, helpless, stricken, dependent, confused, rather tiresome, and with limited a...
كان علىّ أن أحاول أن أوفق بين فكرتي عن نفسي كإنسانة تتكلم بهدوء ومنضبطة تماما, إنسانة على الأقل حساسة عموما لأمزجة ومشاعر الآخرين.. وبين امرأة ساخطة ومجنونة تماما وفاقدة لكل منافذ السيطرة على النفس وا...
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.
الشعور بأنك طبيعي لأي فترة طويلة ممتدة يعطيك آمالًا يتضح -تقريبًا بثبات- أنها مكتوبة على الماء!
But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine.
Having heard so often, and so believably, John Donne’s bell tolling softly that Thou must die, one turns more sharply to life, with an immediacy and appreciation that would not otherwise exist.
Profound melancholia is a day-in, day-out, night-in, night-out, almost arterial level of agony.
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?
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 mor...
I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seei...
In fact, many features of hypomania--such as outgoingness, increased energy, intensified sexuality, increased risk-taking, persuasiveness, self-confidence, and heightened productivity--have been linke...
God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.
I read it as if it had been written by someone else, although it was my own experience being recounted.The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in...
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply...
When both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged w...
