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Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

Kay Redfield Jamison

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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Many
Existentially
Like
Depressions
People
Depressed
Somehow
Complicated
Based
Actually
Felt

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.
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An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.
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There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.
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Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
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I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.
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But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.
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From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression depression remains under treated.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.
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Mood disorders are terribly painful illnesses, and they are isolating illnesses. And they make people feel terrible about themselves when, in fact, they can be treated.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
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Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
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Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
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Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers...Restlessness and discontent are vital things... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Suicide Note: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss. -Langston Hughes
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths
Kay Redfield Jamison
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I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.
Kay Redfield Jamison