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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

Kay Redfield Jamison

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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Realized
Didn
Wanted
Without
Bereavement

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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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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Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our argument here-sharpened and unusually creative thinking and increased productivity?
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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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
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There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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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
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An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.
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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In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can't describe to anybody. So it's an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
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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One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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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Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth.
Kay Redfield Jamison