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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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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Calm
Notes
Rivers
Hughes
Cool
Note
Asked
River
Face
Kiss
Faces
Suicide
Kissing
More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison
The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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 Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one?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 both, hopefully much that is neither.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Manic depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Never once, during any of my bouts of depression, had I been inclined or able to pick up a telephone and ask a friend for help. It wasn't in me.
Kay Redfield Jamison
I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
People talk about grief as if it's kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it's a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through and it really helps you out.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
Kay Redfield Jamison
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
Kay Redfield Jamison
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, reactions to what life has dealt.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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
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
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
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
If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living?
Kay Redfield Jamison