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!

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?”

That too much elation is a chimera.

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.

“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

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?

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 love that she still has these moments when closeness