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An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.

Kay Redfield Jamison

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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Ardent
Temperament
Vulnerable
Makes

More quotes by 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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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 Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one?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
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In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief and they really need to be treated for depression.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe.
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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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
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I think that when you're depressed, you can't concentrate long enough and well enough to read for the most part some people can, but by and large people - that's one of the first things that goes, is the capacity to read meaningful literature. With grief, that's not true. For a while you can't read, but then you really are amenable to solace.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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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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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Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
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.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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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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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
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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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I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.
Kay Redfield Jamison
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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
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Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
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
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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