Standing on the edge with my patients—abiding with them—means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.

Woolf, they said, Dante, Sexton, Lowell. With each pronouncement the group seemed to gain confidence and momentum: Shelley, Plath, van Gogh. It struck me as a marching song. A cadence by which the Mad Pride parade could rally and process: Handel, Hemingway, Munch!

I love that she still has these moments when closeness

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

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

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

I have found that one of the gifts of medicine is that it allows those who practice it to participate in the purest and most vulnerable moments of human life.

I adore this about her. The insistence upon beauty and awe being a daily part of her life. The fixed principle of the thing.