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 love animals, and I was always attracted to the idea of being a zoo veterinarian or a veterinarian with the circus.

I think one thing is that 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...

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...

Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent...

People respond differently to people who are grieving. They reach out. But depression is so very isolating. It’s hard to explain to anyone who has never been depressed how isolating it is. Grief comes and...

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...

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.

I believe that curiosity, wonder and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers; that restlessness and discontent are vital things; and that intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways that less...

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...

Others imply that they know what it is like to be depressed because they have gone through a divorce, lost a job, or broken up with someone. But these experiences carry with them feelings. Depression,...

With grief, you have reason to despair; it’s a human thing.

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

There are a lot of studies that suggest a higher rate of creativity in bipolars than the general population.

I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride....

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.

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?

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.

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the...

He thought of women in terms of breasts, not minds, and it always seemed to irritate him that most women had both.

Knowledge is marvelous, but wisdom is even better.

Psychotherapy is a sanctuary; it is a battleground; it is a place I have been psychotic, neurotic, elated, confused, and despairing beyond belief.

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.

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...

Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential.

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...

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. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet...

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 things so bad about depression and bipolar disorder is that if you don’t have prior awareness, you don’t have any idea what hit you.

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...

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,...

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...

Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy

‘An Unquiet Mind’ wasn’t hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.

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...

Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting.

People talk about grief as if it’s kind of an unremittingly awful thing, and it is. It is painful, but it’s a very, very interesting sort of thing to go through, and it really helps...

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. It is an odd thing,...

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they’re better, they no longer...

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this...

I say I’m an academic: a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. And I write.

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.

Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.

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....

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

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.

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

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief, and they really need to be treated for depression.

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.

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.