Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes About Mental Illness

Quotes about: Mental Illness

• 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, instead, is flat, hollow, and unendurable. ... You're frightened, and you're frightening, and you're 'not at all like yourself but will be soon,' but you know you won't.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Jobs, Divorce

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2014). “An Unquiet Mind: A memoir of moods and madness”, p.133, Pan Macmillan

• 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

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Play, Roles

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2011). “Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide”, p.84, Vintage

• 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

  Suicide, Pain, Motivation

  FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from Feb 18, 2013

• I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Depression, Writing, Thinking

• 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?

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Sad, Depression, Moving

  FaceBook post by Kay Redfield Jamison from May 29, 2011

• Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Moving, Reality, Mind

  Kay Redfield Jamison (2009). “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness”, p.67, Vintage

• If people can talk about having breast cancer, why can't people who have mental illness talk about mental illness? Until we're able to do that, we're not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Cancer, People, Disease

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. September 30, 2009.

• I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Suicide, Thinking, People

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. September 30, 2009.

• 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 that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering.

  Kay Redfield Jamison

  Anxiety, Bipolar, Resilience

  "Kay Redfield Jamison - A deep love and loss". "All In The Mind" with Natasha Mitchell, www.abc.net.au. January 15, 2011.

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