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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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Kay Redfield Jamison
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 22
Essayist
Psychologist
Think
Bipolar
Thinking
Intimately
People
Tied
Illness
Suicide
Particularly
Mental
Understand
Depressive

More quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison

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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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Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
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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.
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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.
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There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide.
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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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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.
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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.
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Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again.
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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.
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Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.
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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
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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.
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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
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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.
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Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name it is a tragedy
Kay Redfield Jamison
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Others would say to me, 'It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it,' but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, 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
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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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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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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