Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
Christine Montrossamazon.com
Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
I adore this about her. The insistence upon beauty and awe being a daily part of her life. The fixed principle of the thing.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
That too much elation is a chimera.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
For my patients, madness is not a political statement. More important, it is something by which hardly any of my patients would choose to be burdened. For those of us who are fortunate enough to be comparatively sane, it is abhorrent to stand in celebration of Woolf’s madness. It did, after all, cost her her life. It is audacious and self-serving o
... See moreChristine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
Most of us cannot exist over time in a sustained state of exultation. More often a high is a sign of a crash to come.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
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.”
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
Mental illness pierces the veil, and those who suffer from it dwell with their fragility in plain view. My role as a psychiatrist is not to try to repair the veil but to strengthen my patients so that they can live, so that they can suffer less, so that they can hope.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
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.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
She is, it turns out, thinking about the body. How we inhabit the architecture of the bodies we are given. How our bodies can be powerful and how they can be encumbrances. How they can feel inextricably linked to our identities yet how they can also misrepresent and betray us.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
it is scarier to face a threat alone, without someone there to see what you are experiencing, to comfort, to understand.
Christine Montross • Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
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?