Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis

I love that she still has these moments when closeness

it is scarier to face a threat alone, without someone there to see what you are experiencing, to comfort, to understand.

It is hard to be empathetic and helpful to a patient if you see her as a threat to your credibility.

Most of us cannot exist over time in a sustained state of exultation. More often a high is a sign of a crash to come.

The brilliant psychologist and author Kay Redfield Jamison has said that bipolar disorder—an illness from which she herself suffers—“benefits mankind at the expense of the individual.”

The circumstances of the world shift without explanation or warning. Why do some of us meet difficulty with despair and others do so with fortitude? Who can comfort us when we are scared? Whom do we gather around us when darkness descends and the trees fall? What if a tragedy in a person’s life cannot be so plainly seen by others? What if it cannot

If I am to abide with these patients, then I must accompany them to that place among the rocks, to the sweating wall. I must face with them the uncertainty of what lies beyond. I must stand at the edge with them and peer over into the fathomless depths. If I tell my patients, as I do, that this life can be a tolerable one, that they can face their

We all long, at some point, for a profound awakening. We travel with the expectation that the places we see and the encounters we have will transform us. We go to theaters and museums and holy sites in the hope of discovering something that will have a new and permanent resonance in our lives. It’s a human hunger. We want transformative things and

The body mystifies. The mind more so. Witnessing their complex intersections—and the unbidden ways in which the two can catastrophically fray—can unmoor us.

The French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil wrote that to understand affliction one must accept our total human vulnerability. “I may lose at any moment,” she wrote, “through the play of circumstance over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as b