Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

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

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

I think mental illness is a slippery slope to talk about these days because people are overly diagnosed, overly prescribed, overly everything.

You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

In total, I was diagnosed with depression by eight psychotherapists and psychiatrists over a period of thirteen years. Diagnosed wrong. Absolutely wrong. My accurate diagnosis was manic depression, or what we call bipolar disorder today.

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

I was doing general medicine and during residency, I moonlighted at a psychiatric hospital and became very interested in the medical care of psychiatric patients.

Depression has existed as long as mankind itself, and certainly well before psychiatry, antidepressant medication, or the nation of America itself came into being.

I was going to university to study psychology and my big ambition in life was to open treatment rooms for psychotherapy.

Everyone knows someone who is struggling with a mental health issue, whether it's depression, trauma or substance abuse. It affects everyone, so we all have a stake in making sure good treatment is available.

From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression; depression remains under treated.

For mental illnesses, we need better access to treatment and diagnosis.

Psychiatrists don't solve anything from one day to the next.

Well, many insane people and seriously mentally ill people seem very reasonable.

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

My dad is a doctor, a professor of psychiatry, and my mum is a psychotherapist.

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.

I would not be here now if I did not have anti-depressants.

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

Alright, so I'm a manic depressive. What do you want from me?

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.