Credits to :
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/bipolar?id=bipolar
“I'm the girl who is lost in space,
the girl who is disappearing always,
forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background.
Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave,
but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve,
the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies,
will remain behind as an ironic remnant.
I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party
someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone.
When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you,
I will no longer be there.
I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union.
Because with every day that goes by,
I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...”
― Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“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.
It is also tiresome.
People cannot abide being around you when you are depressed.
They might think that they ought to, and they might even try,
but you know and they know that you are tedious beyond belief:
you are irritable and paranoid and humorless and lifeless and
critical and demanding and no reassurance is ever enough.
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, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness,
and terror involved in this kind of madness.
When you're high it's tremendous.
The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars,
and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones.
Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there,
the power to captivate others a felt certainty.
There are interests found in uninteresting people.
Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible.
Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence,
and euphoria pervade one's marrow.
But, somewhere, this changes.
The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many;
overwhelming confusion replaces clarity.
Memory goes.
Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern.
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, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“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 one that feels psychological in the experience of it,
an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure,
yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering
and, not infrequently, suicide.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“
When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried.
So I don’t.
The money will come from somewhere;
I am entitled;
God will provide.
Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse.
Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy.
What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach.
So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance.
I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture,
three watches within an hour of one another
(in the Rolex rather than Timex class:
champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania),
and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes.
During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books
having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy:
books on the natural history of the mole,
twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice
if the penguins could form a colony.
Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer
for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line.
Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember,
I was totally confused.
I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars
during my two major manic episodes,
and God only knows how much more
during my frequent milder manias.
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: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford.
It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications,
blood tests, and psychotherapy.
They, at least, are partially deductible.
But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into t
he Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss.
So after mania, when most depressed,
you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“
Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death.
Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks,
an eight ball of coke cut with speed.
It's fun and it's frightening as hell.
Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes;
other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively.
But the "mixed state," the mercurial churning of both high and low,
is the most dangerous, the most deadly.
Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature
and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with
depression's paranoid self-loathing.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family
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