It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories.
I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news.
I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me.
I had tried years earlier to kill myself, and nearly died in the attempt, but did not consider it either a selfish or a not-selfish thing to have done. It was simply the end of what I could bear, the...
I focused on the questions and stopped seeing the body. As has been true a thousand times since, my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally, but th...
I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple.
I avoided situations that might otherwise trip or jangle my hypersensitive wiring, and I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind qas off chasing rabbits in...
His wife maintains she can tell whether or not Jim is in the house simply by the amount of energy she feels in the air. But
Before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.
You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but you will be soon,' but you know you won't.
Well, there never was anything he could say, that’s the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn’t say that kept me alive; all the compassion and warmth...
We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this - through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial...
Two aspects of thinking in particular are pronounced in both creative and hypomanic thought: fluency, rapidity, and flexibility of thought on the one hand, and the ability to combine ideas or categori...
There is, in Peanuts, an underlying and profound sadness which reflects not only Schulz's own struggles with depression but his sensitivity to the quiet terrors of human loneliness. The most terrifyin...
The simultaneous existence and shared residence of such opposite moods and feelings is well-illustrated by Franz Schubert's assertion that whenever he sat down to write songs of love he wrote songs of...
The review of studies of seasonal patterns for peak months of occurrence for episodes of mania and depression indicates that there is a consistency of findings despite the methodological problems intr...
The merrier the heart, alleged Burton, the longer the life. Modern science tends to support his contention: positive emotions such as joy act as breathers from stress and in doing so they help to rest...
The horror of profound depression, and the hopelessness that usually accompanies it, are hard to imagine for those who have not experienced them. Because the despair is private, it is resistant to cle...
The emphasis on shifting essences, uncertainty, and fiercely contrasting opposite states was, of course, neither new nor unique to Byron. He and the other Romantic poets, however, took the ideas and e...
The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed me does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifte...