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

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!

“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

To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: “. . . There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished and be replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sort.” To be aware of this in the depths of one’s soul is to experience non-being. It is the st

But even if it is madness that makes possible extraordinary creation, how much ingenuity and productivity are short-circuited by that same madness? How much potential greatness is lost in insanity’s dark corners?

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.

That too much elation is a chimera.

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

At what point can we know that ecstasy, or singular purpose, or religious fervor has become pathological, if we don’t wish to wait until obvious and irreversible damage has been done?

How well can you tolerate my suffering? How well can you sit with the pain?