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...
On occasion, these periods of total despair would be made even worse by terrible agitation. My mind would race from subject to subject, but instead of being filled with the exuberant and cosmic though...
Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling abou...
No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions.
Navy Cotillion was where officers’ children were supposed to learn the fine points of manners, dancing, white gloves, and other unrealities of life. It also was where children were supposed to learn,...
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, reaction...
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...
Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and, especially, through its savage moods....
Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven’t understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person’s world.
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, and that freedom from the control imp...
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters … I should be i...
In the bipolar patients we have studied, there is a significantly increased number of small areas of focal signal hyperintensities [areas of increased water concentration] suggestive of abnormal tissu...
I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life... Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and e...
I lost a great innocence when I understood that I and my mind were not going to be on good terms for the rest of my life. I can’t tell you how tired I am of character-building experiences. But I treas...
I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations
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...
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...
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...
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.