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.

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.

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.

I love that she still has these moments when closeness

The French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil wrote that to understand affliction one must accept our total human vulnerability. “I may lose at any moment,” she wrote, “through the play of circumstance over which I have no control, anything whatsoever I possess, including those things which are so intimately mine that I consider them as b

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

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?

How well can you tolerate my suffering? How well can you sit with the pain?

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.”