Kay Redfield Jamison Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

We expect well-informed treatment for cancer or heart disease; it matters no less for depression.

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

A possible link between 'madness' and genius is one of the oldest and most persistent of cultural notions.

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 goes, but depression is unremitting.