Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
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Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
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?”
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
... See moreTo 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
... See moreThat too much elation is a chimera.
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?
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.
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?
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.”
“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
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