At one point this weekend my psyche was so fucked up that I almost convinced myself to attempt suicide in order to get hospitalized, because I thought I couldn’t deal with everything right now and because I just wanted to leave everything and all of the stress behind. I honestly don’t know how I got through this weekend.
Every seventeen minutes in America, someone commits suicide … Mostly, I have been impressed by how little value our society puts on saving the lives of those who are in such despair as to want to end them. It is a societal illusion that suicide is rare. It is not.
Kay Jamison
Depression is a painfully slow, crashing death. Mania is the other extreme, a wild roller coaster run off its tracks, an eight ball of coke cut with speed. It’s fun and it’s frightening as hell. Some patients - bipolar type I - experience both extremes; other - bipolar type II - suffer depression almost exclusively. But the “mixed state,” the mercurial churning of both high and low, is the most dangerous, the most deadly. Suicide too often results from the impulsive nature and physical speed of psychotic mania coupled with depression’s paranoid self-loathing.
David Lovelace
