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.

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?

To acknowledge the reality of affliction means saying to oneself: “. . . There is nothing that I might not lose. It could happen at any moment that what I am might be abolished and be replaced by anything whatsoever of the filthiest and most contemptible sort.” To be aware of this in the depths of one’s soul is to experience non-being. It is the st

it is scarier to face a threat alone, without someone there to see what you are experiencing, to comfort, to understand.

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.

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

That too much elation is a chimera.

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

Even if madness is at the root of some of the world’s great creations, it is hard to imagine that if someone asked each of us to live an entire life of suffering in the service of the arts, we would agree to do so. Even if we might choose such altruism, it’s unlikely we would allow anyone else to make that decision for us.