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

For my patients, madness is not a political statement. More important, it is something by which hardly any of my patients would choose to be burdened. For those of us who are fortunate enough to be comparatively sane, it is abhorrent to stand in celebration of Woolf’s madness. It did, after all, cost her her life. It is audacious and self-serving o

Does that mean that psychiatry leaves no room for divinity? That we’d medicate a person out of what could otherwise be a transformative and saintly life? That we’d subjugate—or, worse, block—some message from God?”

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

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.

She is, it turns out, thinking about the body. How we inhabit the architecture of the bodies we are given. How our bodies can be powerful and how they can be encumbrances. How they can feel inextricably linked to our identities yet how they can also misrepresent and betray us.

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

“As an experience,” Virginia Woolf once declared, “madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about.” To top it off, the allure of Woolf’s “madness” is not limited to this heady state of inspiration but also offers a kind of rare and perfect productivity. “It shoots out of

Being married to another writer is wonderful. Being married to another writer whose strengths compensate for your deficiencies is miraculous.

Obsessions are involuntary, upsetting, persistent thoughts that cannot be reasoned away. Hallucinations are false sensory perceptions.

I believe that healing is a kind of holiness. But like any good religion, it leaves me with a fair number of huge and unanswerable questions.