Moods and Madness
Jan. 21st, 2004 02:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mousmePhnee's been reading again... ;)
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and coathor of the standard medical text, among other notable achievements. She's one of the foremost specialists of manic-depressive illness, or as it's better known today, bipolar disorder (she doesn't like that term as much). She has also suffered from the illness for more than thirty years.
Something in this passage resonated with me, perhaps because she was able to articulate something which I've been trying to explain for a very long time to people in a very clumsy way. So I'm co-opting her words in order to explain myself better. :) (Richard is her husband, fyi)
I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it that one so desperately desires. It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it vert difficul to see it as illness, rather than as being willful, angry, irrational, or simply tiresome. What I experience as beyond my control can instead seem to him deliberate and frightening. It is, at these times, impossible for me to convey my desperation and pain; it is harder still, afterward, to recover from the damaging acts and dreadful words. These terrible black manias, with their agitated, ferocious and savage sides, are understandably difficult for Richard to understand and almost as difficult for me to explain.
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nore beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both.
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at the John Hopkins School of Medicine and coathor of the standard medical text, among other notable achievements. She's one of the foremost specialists of manic-depressive illness, or as it's better known today, bipolar disorder (she doesn't like that term as much). She has also suffered from the illness for more than thirty years.
Something in this passage resonated with me, perhaps because she was able to articulate something which I've been trying to explain for a very long time to people in a very clumsy way. So I'm co-opting her words in order to explain myself better. :) (Richard is her husband, fyi)
I have become fundamentally and deeply skeptical that anyone who does not have this illness can truly understand it. And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it that one so desperately desires. It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it vert difficul to see it as illness, rather than as being willful, angry, irrational, or simply tiresome. What I experience as beyond my control can instead seem to him deliberate and frightening. It is, at these times, impossible for me to convey my desperation and pain; it is harder still, afterward, to recover from the damaging acts and dreadful words. These terrible black manias, with their agitated, ferocious and savage sides, are understandably difficult for Richard to understand and almost as difficult for me to explain.
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one's dark moods. Love can help, it can make the pain more tolerable, but, always, one is beholden to medication that may or may not always work and may or may not be bearable. Madness, on the other hand, most certainly can, and often does, kill love through its mistrustfulness, unrelenting pessimism, discontents, erratic behavior, and especially, through its savage moods. The sadder, sleepier, slower, and less volatile depressions are more intuitively understood and more easily taken in stride. A quiet melancholy is neither threatening nore beyond ordinary comprehension; an angry, violent, vexatious despair is both.
