I think that one of the many advantages of death accruing over a long period of time is that you do have time to meet a lot of other people who are g….

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more l….

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….

Tumultuouness,if coupled to discipline and cool mind,is not such a bad sort of thing.That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life,one ought….

Mood disorders are terribly painful illnesses, and they are isolating illnesses. And they make people feel terrible about themselves when, in fact, t….

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 thes….

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own ….

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 pos….

Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers...Restlessness and discontent are vital things... Inten….

the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness if my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe once i was better, that the illness was o….

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 bu….

I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and ….

It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse ….

Far too many doctors-many of them excellent physicians-commit suicide each year; one recent study concluded that, until quite recently, the United St….

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rath….

Suicide is a particularly awful way to die: the mental suffering leading up to it is usually prolonged, intense and unpalliated. There is no morphine….

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless….

But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete….

Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life..

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

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal ….