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?”

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?

That too much elation is a chimera.

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

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

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.

Self-injury is even less comprehensible to us than suicide. Suicide at least can be cast as a desperate attempt to end torment and pain. How do we make sense of behavior whose very intention is to bring about damage and pain and yet survive?

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.”

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