We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds... But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater...
This was not why 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. Only it was twenty-three years, and I was still p...
The fates and character of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the...
The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides
The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.
Thank you for a lovely weekend. They tell me it rained.
Some part of me instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood this pain, never imagining that I would someday look in the mirror and see their sadness and insanity in my own eyes.
Slowly the darkness began to weave its way into my mind, and before long I was hopelessly out of control. I could not follow the path of my own thoughts. Sentences flew around in my head and fragmente...
People say, when I complain of being less lively, less energetic, less high-spirited, Well, now you’re just like the rest of us, meaning, among other things, to be reassuring. But I compare myself wit...
Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry feelings. Depression, instead, i...
My thinking, far from being clearer than a crystal, was tortuous. I would read the same passage over and over again only to realize that I had no memory at all for what I had just read. Each book or p...
Much like crossing the Bay Bridge when there is a storm over the Chesapeake, one may be terrified to go forward, but there is no question of going back.
Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.
Mood disorders , in addition to exhibiting seasonal patterns, frequently show pronounced diurnal rhythms as well.
Mogens Schou, a Danish psychiatrist who, more than anyone, is responsible for the introduction of lithium as a treatment for manic-depressive illness,
Like my father, I looked up rather more than I looked out.
Later, after Christmas carols and a nightcap of mulled ale in front of the fire, Mole reflects on how much he has missed the warmth and security of what he once had known, all of those friendly things...
It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illne...
It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. 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,...
It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit...