It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative – which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. Sylvia Plath
I wondered why I couldn’t go the whole way doing what I should any more. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn’t, the way Doreen did, and this made me even sadder and more tired. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream. ibid.
The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. ibid.
Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity.
When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes?
That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. Alice Jamieson, Today I’m Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
Bipolar robs you of that which is you. It can take from you the very core of your being and replace it with something that is completely opposite of who and what you truly are. Because my bipolar went untreated for so long, I spent many years looking in the mirror and seeing a person I did not recognize or understand. Not only did bipolar rob me of my sanity, but it robbed me of my ability to see beyond the space it dictated me to look. I no longer could tell reality from fantasy, and I walked in a world no longer my own. Alyssa Reyans, Letters from a Bipolar Mother
The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness
People take the mickey out of mental health, but it is very delicate. Frank Bruno
Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top. John Keats
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V. Virginia Woolf
But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more. But they beckoned; leaves were alive; trees were alive. And the leaves being connected by millions of fibres with his own body ... Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds ... All taken together meant the birth of a new religion. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, Septimus
This fall I think you're riding for – it’s a special kind of fall, a horrible kind. The man falling isn’t permitted to feel or hear himself hit bottom. He just keeps falling and falling. The whole arrangement’s designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn’t supply them with. Or they thought their own environment couldn’t supply them with. So they gave up looking. They gave it up before they ever really even got started. J D Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
my mother, poor fish,
wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a
week, telling me to be happy: ‘Henry, smile!
why don’t you ever smile?’
and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the
saddest smile I ever saw. Charles Bukowski
You’re fucked. You thought you were going to be someone, but now it’s obvious you’re nobody. You haven’t got as much talent as you thought you had, and there was no Plan B, and you got no skills and no education, and now you’re looking at forty or fifty years of nothing. Less than nothing, probably. That’s pretty heavy. That’s worse than having the brain thing, because what you got now will take a lot longer to kill you. You’ve got the choice of a slow, painful death, or a quick, merciful one. Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down
I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep. Ursula K Le Guin
I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action. Philip Larkin
My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfilment of which I could consider reasonable. If I desired anything, I knew in advance that whether I satisfied my desire or not, nothing would come of it. Had a fairy come and offered to fulfil my desires I should not have known what to ask. If in moments of intoxication I felt something which, though not a wish, was a habit left by former wishes, in sober moments I knew this to be a delusion and that there was really nothing to wish for. I could not even wish to know the truth, for I guess of what it consisted. The truth was that life is meaningless. Leo Tolstoy
That life believe me I can say in all seriousness I would not wish on my worst enemy. It has made a wreck of me. I am ill. You understand? Physically ill. I suffer from shortness of breath. I have heartburn. My digestion doesn’t function. My vision is blurred. And I live in constant fear of something. You might not believe this, but I have turned into a psychopath. Anton Chekhov: Comedy Shorts: A Reluctant Tragic Hero starring Johnny Vegas & Mackenzie Crook, Vegas, Sky Arts 2010
Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair. R D Laing
The divided self. R D Laing, book on schizophrenia, 1960
Perhaps most disturbing is the suggestion that ADHD is nothing more than the invention of pharmaceutical companies who have used clinical trials to create a disease that can be treated with their drugs. Mail on Sunday article 27th November 2007, The Scandal of Kiddy Coke
I was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, spending time in the world of children who have been diagnosed with mental disorders and put on psychoactive medication. Faced with the challenging behaviour of their kids more and more parents in America view these medications as a godsend. Yet the drugs and some of the diagnoses are still controversial. Louis Theroux: America’s Medicated Kids, BBC 2010
The issue of whether bipolar really exists in kids still divides the medical community, and much is unknown about children’s disorders generally. ibid.
The most common diagnosis is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. ibid.
For the first time in sixty years Ohio State Psychiatric Hospitals had allowed cameras in to film with patients. Most of the men and women I’d be meeting had committed serious crimes but had found NGRI [Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity]. Louis Theroux: By Reason of Insanity I, BBC 2015
Brian had first been admitted to hospital twenty years earlier after killing his mother. Louis Theroux: Be Reason of Insanity II
A serious sexual assault on a close family member. His name was Dean ... Not guilty by reason of insanity. ibid.
He’d stabbed and killed a man at random. ibid.
I was spending time with women dealing with mental illness brought on by having babies. For all its joys, new motherhood can be a time of extreme psychiatric difficulty. In homes and in specialised units I was with families and staff working to find a way back to recovery, exploring the wrenching challenges of caring for two people of the most vulnerable states in their lives. Louis Theroux: Mothers on the Edge, BBC 2019