98+ Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes On Education, Friendship And Mental Health Advocacy

Kay Redfield Jamison is an American psychologist and writer. She is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. She is best known for her work on bipolar disorder, which she has suffered from since her late teens. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kay Redfield Jamison on leadership, education, life.

Top 10 Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes

1. Confidentiality is an ancient and well-warranted social value.
2. There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
3. You become aware of an illness by understanding yourself and understanding the meaning that that illness has in your own life, symbolically and, more importantly, quite literally.
4. 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.
5. I think people don't understand how intimately tied suicide is to mental illness, particularly to depressive illness and bipolar illness.
6. I think wanting to write is a fundamental sign of disease and discomfort. I don't think people who are comfortable want to write.
7. I am by temperament an optimist, and I thought from the beginning that there was much to be written about suicide that was strangely heartening.
8. Love has, at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
9. The quickness and flexibility of a well mind, a belief or hope that things will eventually sort themselves out-these are the resources lost to a person when the brain is ill.
10. Suicide is not a blot on anyone’s name; it is a tragedy

Kay Redfield Jamison Short Quotes

• Suicide Note: The calm, Cool face of the river Asked me for a kiss. -Langston Hughes
• An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers.
• Without science, there would be no such hope.
• We all move uneasily within our restraints.
• Everyone has good cause for suicide, or at least it seems that way to those who search for it. (74)
• Most people don't have the advantage of being able to evaluate their doctor in advance.
• I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.
• Grief comes and goes, but depression is unremitting
• One of the advantages of science is that one's work, ultimately, is either replicated or it is not.
• Nothing good comes out of depression.

Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes About Life

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Each way to suicide is its own: intensely private, unknowable, and terrible. Suicide will have seemed to its perpetrator the last and best of bad possibilities, and any attempt by the living to chart this final terrain of life can be only a sketch, maddeningly incomplete — Kay Redfield Jamison

Chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I had been simply treating water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in seeking out life. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It is true that I had wanted to die , but that is peculiarly different from regretting having been born. Overwhelmingly, I was enormously glad to have been born, grateful for life, and I couldn’t imagine not wanting to pass on life to someone else. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Tumultuouness,if coupled to discipline and cool mind,is not such a bad sort of thing.That unless one wants to live a stunningly boring life,one ought to terms with one`s darker side ad one`s darker energies — Kay Redfield Jamison

Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes About Love

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable — Kay Redfield Jamison

Look to the living, love them, and hold on. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Exuberance is a gift of grace that allows us to move on, to seek, to love again. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Kay Redfield Jamison Famous Quotes And Sayings

Anybody who's had to contend with mental illness - whether it's depression, bipolar illness or severe anxiety, whatever - actually has a fair amount of resilience in the sense that they've had to deal with suffering already, personal suffering. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I have had manic-depressive illness, also known as bipolar disorder, since I was 18 years old. It is an illness that ensures that those who have it will experience a frightening, chaotic and emotional ride. It is not a gentle or easy disease. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide. Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy — Kay Redfield Jamison

Others would say to me, 'It is only temporary, it will pass, you will get over it,' but of course they had no idea how I felt, although they were certain that they did. Over and over and over I would say to myself, If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living? — Kay Redfield Jamison

I, quite literally, woke up from a coma, from having tried to kill myself and it was very clear to me what my psychiatrist had been saying for years. The choice is not between a drug that has side effects or not, life is not ideal. Yes, your drug has side effects and yes if you don't take it you're going to die. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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

If I can't feel, if I can't move, if I can't think, and I can't care, then what conceivable point is there in living? — Kay Redfield Jamison

Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Looking at suicide—the sheer numbers, the pain leading up to it, and the suffering left behind—is harrowing. For every moment of exuberance in the science, or in the success of governments, there is a matching and terrible reality of the deaths themselves: the young deaths, the violent deaths, the unnecessary deaths — Kay Redfield Jamison

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 it's an isolating pain, a completely isolating pain. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think that when you're depressed, you can't concentrate long enough and well enough to read for the most part; some people can, but by and large people - that's one of the first things that goes, is the capacity to read meaningful literature. With grief, that's not true. For a while you can't read, but then you really are amenable to solace. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I am a huge advocate of prescription drugs given wisely and for the right reasons and the right diagnosis and also psychotherapy. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Anyone who suggests that coming back from suicidal despair is a straightforward journey has never taken it. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Curiosity, wonder, and passion are defining qualities of imaginative minds and great teachers...Restlessness and discontent are vital things... Intense experience and suffering instruct us in ways less intense emotions can never do. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The pursuit of knowledge is an intoxicant, a lure that scientists and explorers have known from ancient times; indeed, exhilaration in the pursuit of knowledge is part of what has kept our species so adaptive. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I look back over my shoulder and feel the presence of an intense young girl and then a volatile and disturbed young woman, both with high dreams and restless, romantic aspirations — Kay Redfield Jamison

When I am high I couldn't worry about money of I tried. So I don't. The money will come from 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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The assumption that rigidly rejecting words and phrases that have existed for centuries will have much impact on public attitudes is rather dubious. — Kay Redfield Jamison

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered. That damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Conditions of thought, memory, and desire, persuaded by impulse and irrationality, are influenced as well by personal aesthetics and private meanings. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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

...Time does not heal, It makes a half-stitched scar That can be broken and again you feel Grief as total as in its first hour. -Elizabeth Jennings — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I had a terrible temper, after all, and though it rarely erupted, when it did it frightened me and anyone near its epicenter. It was the only crack, but a disturbing one, in the otherwise vacuum-sealed casing of my behavior. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our argument here-"sharpened and unusually creative thinking" and "increased productivity"? — Kay Redfield Jamison

It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth. My mother taught me to gentle it; gave me the discipline and love to break it; and- as Alexander had known so intuitively with Bucephalus- she understood, and taught me, that the beast was best handled by turning it toward the sun. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Nature is the first tutor. No one remains untouched or unschooled by the earth, seasons, and heavens. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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. ... 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

I was bitterly resentful, but somehow greatly relieved. And I respected him enormously for his clarity of thought, his obvious caring, and his unwillingness to equivocate in delivering bad news. — Kay Redfield Jamison

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise---and inexplicably---to be envied. — Kay Redfield Jamison

But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I wish I could explain it so someone could understand it. I'm afraid it's something I can't put into words. There's just this heavy, overwhelming despair - dreading everything. Dreading life. Empty inside, to the point of numbness. It's like there's something already dead inside. My whole being has been pulling back into that void for months. (81) — Kay Redfield Jamison

I don't think grief of grief in a medical way at all. I think that I and many of my colleagues, are very concerned when grief becomes pathological, that there is no question that grief can trigger depression in vulnerable people and there is no question that depression can make grief worse. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I compare myself with my former self, not with others. Not only that, I tend to compare my current self with the best I have been, which is when I have been midly manic. When I am my present "normal" self, I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent. In sort, for myself, I am a hard act to follow. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Mania can be as terrifying as it gets. It is certainly as insane as one gets and so it's frightening when it gets out of control, but there are periods of mania when it can be extremely attractive. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 manic depressive illness because I was used to things coming and going and so forth. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. In some strange way, I have tried to do that with manic-depressive illness. It has been a fascinating, albeit deadly, enemy and companion; I have found it to be seductively complicated, a distillation both of what is finest in our natures, and of what is most dangerous. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There are relatively few things that kill people that are young other than car accidents and suicide. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no... and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough, I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think that one of the many advantages of death accruing over a long period of time is that you do have time to meet a lot of other people who are going through similar situations and one of the great delights of our life actually was sitting around in labs waiting for the results of tests and talking to other people who were waiting to find out whether their cancer numbers were going in the right direction or not. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 not going to be treated with the same kind of respect for our diseases as other people. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person. — Kay Redfield Jamison

People are more impulsive and they get slightly less impulsive as they get older and the impulsiveness interacting with the depression is particularly devastating and lethal, potentially lethal. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides — Kay Redfield Jamison

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

The rites of passage in the academic world are arcane and, in their own way, highly romantic, and the tensions and unplesantries of dissertations and final oral examinations are quickly forgotten in the wonderful moment of the sherry afterward, admission into a very old club, parties of celebration, doctoral gowns, academic rituals, and hearing for the first time "Dr.," rather than "Miss" Jamison. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on — Kay Redfield Jamison

One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still exactly that: dishonest. — Kay Redfield Jamison

In some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief and they really need to be treated for depression. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who 'fail' at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances. — Kay Redfield Jamison

I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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. — Kay Redfield Jamison

When people are suicidal, their thinking is paralyzed, their options appear spare or nonexistent, their mood is despairing, and hopelessness permeates their entire mental domain. The future cannot be separated from the present, and the present is painful beyond solace. ‘This is my last experiment,’ wrote a young chemist in his suicide note. ‘If there is any eternal torment worse than mine I’ll have to be shown. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome. — Kay Redfield Jamison

There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen. — Kay Redfield Jamison

The ancient dialogue between reason and the senses is almost always more interestingly and passionately resolved in favor of the senses. — Kay Redfield Jamison

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 go through and it really helps you out. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Life Lessons by Kay Redfield Jamison

1. Kay Redfield Jamison's work highlights the importance of understanding mental illness, and the need to destigmatize it.
2. Her research and writing emphasize the need for compassion and understanding when dealing with those who suffer from mental illness.
3. She also emphasizes the importance of seeking help and support when dealing with mental health issues, and the need to recognize that mental illness is a real and treatable condition.