Monica Crowley Quotes

No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both.

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.

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.

I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital.

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they're better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn't work that way.

Our family suffers from a hereditary condition called, generally, mental illness. Specifically, multiple family members in successive generations have suffered from either bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

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.

There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others.

I'm manic-depressive, technically bi-polar II with many borderline features.

I've had this problem since I was in my 20s. They don't call it manic depression anymore. They call it a bipolar disorder, and I'm a Type 2.

Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential.

Now, I'm no doctor, but I am on TV. And in my professional opinion, George W. Bush is a paranoid schizophrenic. ...

The federal government has lost its way and largely ignored the needs of people with psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar illness.

Now, bipolar disorder, it goes on a spectrum. There's very severe conditions of it and there are milder ones. I'm lucky enough that it's reasonably mild in my case.

Multiple personality disorder and possession are not necessarily mutually incompatible disorders. There's some evidence that you can have both.

I don't find anything upsetting or gross or degrading about fighting with a mental illness: Bipolar or Schizophrenia.

I lost my father four years ago to what was the culmination of a manic episode that seemingly, to my family, came completely out of the blue after 59 years on this earth with no issues that we knew about, at least - sort of a normal run-of-the-mill guy who did his job and came home and had a family.

I knew something was wrong; I was constantly tired, and I'd developed numbness on my left side. I'd also become paranoid that my boyfriend was cheating on me. I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. One psychiatrist told me I was bipolar.

Being bipolar is a huge exaggeration of your emotions. You can be pretty high and also terribly low, so I've been through it all.

I am bipolar, and I am proud. And that is why I wanted to write a book. To shine a light on mental illness, to be vulnerable about the days I let it take control and paid dearly for it, and to tell anyone fighting a similar battle: You are not alone. You are not broken.

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

I think the science around mental illness is always evolving. There's always new kinds of thinking.

I just always wanted to study human behavior because every psychologist that I would talk to would tell me I was bipolar, and I know I'm not bipolar, so I had to perform a psychoanalysis on myself to find out that I have unresolved grief.

If you give a bipolar man a mic, I don't know what you expect.