Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.
There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.
One of the advantages of science is that one’s work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.
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.
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?
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
Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.
God only knew what ran underneath the fierce self-discipline and emotional control that had come with my upbringing. But the cracks were there, I knew it, and they frightened me.
It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again.
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
The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides
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.
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both.
Psychologists, for reasons of clinical necessity or vagaries of temperament, have chosen to dissect and catalog the morbid emotions – depression, anger, anxiety – and to leave largely unexamined the more vital, positive ones.
No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both.