Kay Redfield Jamison

I love Kay Jamison's books. I have read them all.

So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly feel that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters; worn death close, appreciated it and life more. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and how frail they both are; and how ultimately unknowable they both are. Depressed I have crawled on my hands and knees. Manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than anyone I know much of this related to my illness. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it.
—Kay Redfield Jamison, The Unquiet Mind

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.
—Kay Redfield Jamison

It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness.
—Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.
—Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn't say that kept me alive; all the compassion and warmth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living.
—Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable.
— Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind

Look to the living, love them, and hold on.
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide