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....