Moods are complicated and very much a part of who we are. People would be very boring without them.
Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.
I am one of millions who have been treated for depression and gotten well; I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist well versed in using lithium and knowledgeable about my illness, and who was also an excellent psychotherapist.
I say I'm an academic: a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. And I write.
There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.
It's more common than not that bipolar illness will start in the teens. One of the reasons I spend a lot of time on college campuses is exactly that reason. It's terribly important to talk to students about knowing these things in advance.
'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.
In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression.
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.
It is important to value intellect and discipline, of course, but it is also important to recognize the power of irrationality, enthusiasm and vast energy.
An intense temperament has convinced me to teach not only from books but from what I have learned from experience. So I try to impress upon young doctors and graduate students that tumultuousness, if coupled to discipline and a cool mind, is not such a bad sort of thing.
Mania is as bad as it gets. If not treated, it will become worse, more frequent, and harder to treat.
With grief, you have reason to despair; it's a human thing.
Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.
Several politicians and wives of politicians have been public about their experiences with depression or bipolar illness, including Lawton Chiles, Patrick Kennedy, Tipper Gore and Kitty Dukakis. Each made a tremendous difference by doing so.
A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.
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.
When I'm talking about depression, I'm talking about the more severe forms of depression, and I think that conceptualising as a form of grief is probably not the most effective way of looking at it. I mean, at the end of the day, people suffer enormously, and you want to treat it.
Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.
It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy.
