Manic Depression Quotes

“When you are mad, mad like this, you don't know it. Reality is what you see. When what you see shifts, departing from anyone else's reality, it's still reality to you.”
― Marya Hornbacher, Madness: A Bipolar Life

“One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of.
They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.”
― Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking

“I didn't realize there was a ranking." I said. "Sadie frowned. "What do you mean?" "A ranking," I said. "You know, what's crazier than what." "Oh, sure there is," Sadie said. She sat back in her chair. "First you have your generic depressives. They're a dime a dozen and usually pretty boring. Then you've got the bulimics and the anorexics. They're slightly more interesting, although usually they're just girls with nothing better to do. Then you start getting into the good stuff: the arsonists, the schizophrenics, the manic-depressives. You can never quite tell what those will do. And then you've got the junkies. They're completely tragic, because chances are they're just going to go right back on the stuff when they're out of here." "So junkies are at the top of the crazy chain," I said. Sadie shook her head. "Uh-uh," she said. "Suicides are." I looked at her. "Why?" "Anyone can be crazy," she answered. "That's usually just because there's something screwed up in your wiring, you know? But suicide is a whole different thing. I mean, how much do you have to hate yourself to want to just wipe yourself out?”
― Michael Thomas Ford

“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

“Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”
― Vincent van Gogh

“Compared to bipolar's magic, reality seems a raw deal. It's not just the boredom that makes recovery so difficult, it's the slow dawning pain that comes with sanity - the realization of illnesss, the humiliating scenes, the blown money and friendships and confidence. Depression seems almost inevitable. The pendulum swings back from transcendence in shards, a bloody, dangerous mess. Crazy high is better than crazy low. So we gamble, dump the pills, and stick it to the control freaks and doctors. They don't understand, we say. They just don't get it. They'll never be artists.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“I have never seen battles quite as terrifyingly beautiful as the ones I fight when my mind splinters and races, to swallow me into my own madness, again.”
― Nicole Lyons, Hush

“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 the 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

“I know the empathy borne of despair; I know the fluidity of thought, the expansive, even beautiful, mind that hypomania brings, and I know this is quicksilver and precious and often it's poison. There has always existed a sort of psychic butcher who works the scales of transcendence, who weighs out the bloody cost of true art.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Suddenly I wanted to get better. Mania wasn't fun anymore. It wasn't creative or visionary. It was mean parody at best, a cheap chemical trick. I needed to stop and get better. I'd take whatever they gave me, I pledged silently. I'd take Trilafon or Thorazine or whatever. I just wanted to sleep.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“[ ] manic sex isn't really intercourse. It's dicourse, just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin.”
― Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

“I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“Love is not enough. It takes courage to grab my father's demon, my own, or - God help me - my child's and strap it down and stop its mad jig; to sit in a row of white rooms filled with pills and clubbed dreamers and shout: stop smiling, shut up; shut up and stop laughing; you're sitting in hell. Stop preaching; stop weeping. You are a manic-depressive, always. your life is larger than most, unimaginable. You're blessed; just admit it and take the damn pill.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“I am the moon,
and sometimes I shine full in my dark,
and sometimes I shine half in my dark,
and sometimes I am the darkness myself.”
― Juansen Dizon, Confessions of a Wallflower

“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 one i should willingly give up....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 be seen as temporary, even understandable reactions to what life has dealt....even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.”
― kay redfield jamison

“I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“For some reason the word “chronic” often has to be explained. It does not mean severe, though many chronic conditions can be exceptionally serious and indeed life-threatening. No, “chronic” means persistent over time, enduring, constant. Diabetes is a chronic condition, but measles is not. With measles, you contract it and then it is gone. It can sometimes be fatal, but is never chronic. Manic depression, in other words, is something you have to learn to live with. There are therapies which may help some people to function and function for the most part happily and well. Sometimes a talking therapy, sometimes pharmaceutical intervention helps.”
― Stephen Fry

“I'm heavily medicated yet happily manic, I've been stuck on hypo mania for years.”
― Stanley Victor Paskavich, Stantasyland: Quips Quotes and Quandaries

“That such a final, tragic, and awful thing is suicide can exist in the midst of remarkable beauty is one of the vastly contradictory and paradoxical aspects of life and art.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament

“I'm not the kind of person who likes to shout out my personal issues from the rooftops, but with my bipolar becoming public, I hope fellow sufferers will know it's completely controllable. I hope I can help remove any stigma attached to it, and that those who don't have it under control will seek help with all that is available to treat it.”
― Catherine Zeta-Jones

“In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams.”
― David Lovelace, Scattershot: My Bipolar Family

“I read it as if it had been written by someone else, although it was my own experience being recounted.

The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. "Maniac-depressive illness." I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts in his land and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun,”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“Few things are strong enough to survive that deadly clash of mania and depression. Certainly not love. Love is far too fragile: it is a picture window, just begging to be shattered.”
― Terri Cheney

“The black devil and the blue devil: that was how he’d come to think of the two opposing sides of his nature. Since his early adolescence, the bloodthirsty pair had staked his mind as their battleground, and even now he could feel their presence, lurking, waiting to make their next move.”
― Grace Callaway, Never Say Never to an Earl

“كان علي أن أحاول أن أوفق بين فكرتي عن نفسي كإنسانة تتكلم بهدوء ومنضبطة تماما, إنسانة على الأقل حساسة عموما لأمزجة ومشاعر الآخرين.. وبين امرأة ساخطة ومجنونة تماما وفاقدة لكل منافذ السيطرة على النفس والتفكير العقلاني.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“It’s a little-known secret, and it should probably stay that way: attempting suicide usually jump-starts your brain chemistry. There must be something about taking all those pills that either floods the brain sufficiently or depletes it so completely that balance is restored. Whatever the mechanism, the result is that you emerge on the other side of the attempt with an awareness of what it means to be alive. Simple acts seem miraculous: you can stand transfixed for hours just watching the wind ruffle the tiny hairs along the top of your arm. And always, with every sensation, is the knowledge that you must have survived for a reason. You just can’t doubt it anymore. You must have a purpose, or you would have died. You have the rest of your life to discover what that purpose is. And you can’t wait to start looking.”
― Terri Cheney, Manic: A Memoir

“Bipolar disorder was like that: a wild party that was constantly on the verge of ending, chaos and bright lights, an exaltation of the senses. That was mania. But all parties had their end, and when the shadows were long and the glitter had lost its sparkle and gathered to mingle with the dust on the unclean floors and all the food lost its flavor and the music finally died—that was depression, lurking in between all of the dark spaces of the noise and the laughter, as unavoidable as death or darkness.”
― Nenia Campbell, Batter My Heart

“Ruefully, nobody perceives me as exceptionally gifted, intelligent, handsome, or physically strong. My sense of alienation stems from an inferiority complex, depressive nature, and manic tendencies that repulse other people. For many years, I passively accepted my clumsiness, uselessness, and lack of capacity for learning by avoiding serious literature and other opportunities for personal growth. I embraced personal ignorance by favoring tactile sensations and gross pleasure afforded in a materialistic culture that revels in a hedonistic lifestyle.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“What enraged me about my mother's illness was not precisely the issue of money; it was the fact that she transformed from parent to stranger. The manic episodes would erupt and turn her into a tornado of destruction. Any money she had disappeared. She was fired from jobs, discrimination laws be damned. She struck up friendships with customers at random places. Piles of clutter became mountains in her home; we had to literally clean up the mess. Worst of all, she became impossible to talk to. Her eyes darted around the room and as the speed of her speech increased, what she said made no sense. She could be mean, her language suddenly laden with swears. No one could slow her down or connect with her and she felt gone from me. The person I knew was not there anymore. When that person is your mother, the world becomes a frighteningly uncertain place where anything is possible, as if all the trees and all the world sprouted knives for branches. In the hospital I couldn't say any of this; money was just an easy thing I could point to, a worthless rebuttal to the fact of her bipolar disorder.”
― Margaret Kimball, And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir