Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of bot...
There were, however, definite advantages to studying invertebrate zoology. For starters, unlike in psychology, you could eat your subjects. The lobsters—fresh from the sea and delicious—were especiall...
Schubert’s posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its
My thoughts were so fast that I couldn’t remember the beginning of a sentence halfway through.
Mental exhaustion had taken a long, terrible toll, but, strangely, it was only in feeling well, energetic, and high-spirited again that I had any true sense of the toll taken.
It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and seeking out life. The chance...
It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable, wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. If
I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on
من المزعج أحيانًا رؤية المشاعر و السلوكيات القوية و المعقدة يتم اختزالها في عبارات تشخيصية هامدة و بليدة.
لقد استغرق الأمر سنةً كاملة في إنجلترا لجعلي أدرك أنني كنت فيما مضى أمشي على الماء مكتفيةً بمجرد محاولة البقاء على قيد الحياة و تجنب الألم بدلًا من الاندماج الحقيقي في الحياة.
We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadness of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, a...
Try not to let the fact that you can’t read without effort annoy you. Be philosophical. Even if you could read, you probably wouldn’t remember most of it anyway.
The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in t...
The humor, however, was a bit more in the recounting than in the actual living through it. Unfortunately, this resistance to taking lithium is played out in the lives of tens of thousands of patients...
The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. Manic-depressive illness. I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts on his lands and a p...
So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been...
My manias, at least in their early and mild forms, were absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed...
It did the kind of lasting damage that only something that cuts so quick and deep to the heart can do.
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
Both individuals who are manic and those who are writers, when evaluated with neuropsychological tests, tend to combine ideas or images in a way that blurs, broadens, or shifts conceptual boundaries,...