I have plotted Lombroso's findings in figure 4-3, and it can be seen that he found peaks of productivity in the late spring and early fall.
I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn’t work for me, the answer would be a simple no—and it...
I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it...
I had gotten a Ph.D., and I was beginning to understand Bob Dylans lines Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift.
I had a horrible sense of loss for who I had been and where I had been. It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost...
I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed. Why was I so unwilling? Why did it take having to go through more episodes of mania, followed by long su...
I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
How odd to smile during Richard's funeral. He was dead and I was smiling to myself. Grief does that. Laughter lies close in with despair, numbness near by acuity and memory with forgetfulness. I would...
Guilford concluded that creative individuals were also far more likely to exhibit divergent rather than convergent thinking:In tests of convergent thinking there is almost always one conclusion or ans...
Given that, it turned out to be unnervingly easy to keep my friends and family at psychological bay: To be sure, wrote Hugo Wolf, I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others qu...
Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys.
Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.
Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water. I
Exuberance draws people together and primes them to act boldly; it warrants that the immediate world is safe for exploration and enjoyment and creates a vivifying climate in which a group can rekindle...
Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
Even so, what I read often disappeared from my mind like snow on a hot pavement.
Do we risk making the world a blander, more homogenized place if we get rid of the genes for manic-depressive illness
But, ineffably, psychotherapy heals. It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility of learning from it all. Pills c...
But then as night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash, and my mind again would grind to a halt.
Brian imaging studies conducted while a person is listening to music show that there are increases in cerebral blood flow in the same reward areas of the brain that are active when food, sex, or highl...