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...
Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
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 long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by natu...
He was not, it was clear, going to gaze meaningfully into my eyes over long dinners and fine wines, nor discuss literature and music over late-night coffee and port... Yet not once in the years we hav...
For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of a mental sea; I would, unquestionably...
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...
Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
Even though [my psychiatrist] understood mor than anyone how much I felt I was losing--in energy, vivacity, and originality--by taking medication, he never was seduced into losing sight of the overall...
Vincent van Gogh, for one, wrote that his exuberant mood propelled not just his art but his speech: There are moments, he said, when I am twisted by enthusiasm or madness or prophecy, like a Greek ora...
It is of no little interest and irony that Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin and proponent of selective breeding in humans in order to obtain a highly gifted race of man, was himself subject...
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be...
Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy
I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty in...
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
As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly...