Quote

Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Straightforward
Despair
Journey
Coming
Taken
Anyone
Back
Suicidal
Never
Suggests

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

Image
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
Image
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn’t imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses.
Kay Redfield Jamison
Image
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
Image
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