Occupation: Psychologist Birth: June 22, 1946
I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel bet….
I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life..
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..
I think you have waves of awareness and one of the things that I found with grief was actually - I was well prepared for it by the cyclicality of my ….
Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74).
Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens..
Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest..
In depression, your capacity to feel just flattens and disappears and what you feel is pain and a kind of pain that you can't describe to anybody. So….
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….
Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one's notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can ….
Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blacke….
Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep….
When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeate….
I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses..
I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide..
St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experi….
Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe..
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….
I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no subsitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal peo….
Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value..
The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension..