The Quiet Room: A Journey Out of the Torment of Madness by Lori Schiller and Amanda Bennett

() Not just bipolar, not just schizophrenic: schizoaffective. Lori, one of the authors and main character of the novel, starts hearing voices and hallucinating in her preteens. She knows something might be wrong, but isn't sure what. At one time she even believes that she must be possessed.

She's able to hide her "voices" and extreme moods fairly well until her late college years. At this time, the symptoms become increasingly worse. She becomes depressed and tortured by the voices. Her 3.9 GPA, highly admired and seemingly sociable, happy life comes to a screeching halt with a suicide attempt. She couldn't take it anymore.

From here on she is transferred in and out of hospitals and clinics. She is put on various medications at different times. She does have a period or two where she seems to get better. (But she began to self-medicate with coke.) Ironically, she even starts working at hospitals, including the one she stayed at. Nonetheless her disease becomes increasingly worse. However, she is brought to an alternative program and given experimental medication. Sorry to spoil the ending, but with therapy, she becomes better. She along with her family, friends, and doctors all compile this book. True story.

"When I heard the Voices yelling such terrible things, I grew afraid to make eye contact with the people I was with. I was afraid they had heard the Voices and now knew the terrible secrets about me that they were revealing. [...] I became extremely self-conscious in front of everyone for fear they too would nail me to a taunting cross." (pg. 22 - Lori)
"'You are going to kill yourself driving like that,' he said. I began to laugh hysterically. Right before my very eyes, the state trooper with his hat and sunglasses and uniform had changed into a fantastic creature with bugged-out eyes and hair standing up wildly on end." (pg. 25 - Lori)
"None of us at college could put our fingers on what was wrong. At first, it simply seemed as if she [Lori] was depressed because she was so fun-loving and we were all such grinds. [...] Some of our friends weren't sympathetic at all. In fact, a lot of guys thought she was just bullshitting us." (pg. 30 - college roommate)
"Poor people are crazy, they say, and rich people are eccentric. My mother was rich, and so she was allowed to be eccentric. But now, looking at Lori, I realized that my mother hadn't been eccentric. She had been sick. And now I saw that sickness repeated in her granddaughter. For if Lori was schizophrenic, then so was my mother." (pg. 82 - Lori's mom)
"In fact, I knew they were trying to trick, trying to torment me into madness. I knew they could read my mind and hear all that the Voices were saying about them. The doctors and nursing staff told me repeatedly that the Voices weren't real. But if they weren't real, then how did the staff know they were there?" (pg. 90 - Lori)
"It seemed so strange that my fellow patients could enjoy the Voices they heard in their own heads. On my unit one young man had Voices who told him he was the Messiah. Another young woman always sat by herself, laughing happily. Once I asked her what she was laughing about. 'Hubert is telling me jokes,' she said. [...] I was jealous. There was nothing about my Voices that was friendly. I had tried to make them my allies against the hateful staff. But in reality the Voices terrified me. Sometimes I told the staff they were gone, but I was lying. [...] The Voices yelled so loud they woke me up, leaving me shaking and frightened." (pg. 149 - Lori)
"And as for my newfound 'cure,' that was all a matter of control too. Everyone needs to breathe, but people can still hold their breath underwater. If you practice, you can hold your breath for much longer than you ever believed possible. That's what holding my Voices inside was like. Sure, I could hold it for a few seconds longer. But the explosive rage was building inside all the more for not being allowed to be expressed." (pg. 165 - Lori)
"Was this really my brain? Was this really the same brain that had achieved for me a 3.9 average at one of the most competitive high schools in the country, and a 3.3 average at one of the most competitive colleges? Was this the same brain that learned to speak Spanish? That wrote papers the professors praised?" (pg. 184 - Lori)
"Dr. Fischer and Dr. Doller explained, there weren't really voices that other people could hear. It was just my own thoughts getting blown up out of proportion inside my brain. I listened. I thought about it. No way, I thought at first. I don't have horrible thoughts like that. Those thoughts aren't me. It's those Voices who are the crazy demons, not me. Besides, the Voices were so clear, so real, so vivid. It seemed impossible to me that they were simply figments of my own imagination." (pg. 221 - Lori)
"Finally out of mental exhaustion I collapsed. But I relaxed. The more times I marched myself into the Quiet Room the easier it was. The Quiet Room became a place to chill out and deescalate, rather than to be punished. Finally, the Quiet Room really became quiet." (pg. 224 - Lori)
"Despite all the progress I had made, how could I go out and live in the real world when I couldn't tell what was real from what was not real?" (pg. 227 - Lori)
"We weren't looking for a psychological cause of the illness. None of us disputed the biological cause of schizophrenia. We were, instead, looking to understand the experience of schizophrenia, and to try to help our patients learn to tolerate the experience better. [...] What is there in any human being's experience to prepare him or her to cope with a broken brain? Who can understand what a catastrophe this break is for the human soul? For the thing that is broken is the person's ability to relate to another person." (pg. 237 - Lori's doctor)
"My head kept clearing. Thinking was less of an effort. The scrambled-eggs unscrambled, the mixed-up spaghetti strands of thoughts unraveled. [...] When the Voices reared up and roared, it was as if they hit a glass shield, crashed and fell away. [...] Their noises were muffled and remote. [...] Clozapine was standing between them and my brain. Denied the nourishment of my thoughts, they were perishing. [...] But the biggest change was in the return of something I hadn't realized I was missing: I began to feel connected to other people." (pg. 252 - Lori)

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

() An exquisite portrayal of the intellectualization coping method. In this case, it is utilized to deal with Bipolar I disorder.

The author writes about her life, namely in relation to her illness, love, and her career. She has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology that she obtained from UCLA, and is now a professor at John Hopkins University. Though her story doesn't deviate much from the previous books I have read and reviewed about Bipolar I individuals, there are some slight unique qualities to this book.

For one, she is able to look back at her life and state that if she had a choice, she would still choose to have manic-depressive illness. She goes into detail as to why: "I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; [...] seen the finest and most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are. [...] But normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness - the intensity it gives to things and the perspective it forces on me. I think it has made me test the limits of my mind [...]" (pg. 218)

She admits that she came into her career and succeeded in her profession mostly because of, in subservience and thanks to, her bipolar disorder. "I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it also has been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders. The disease that [...] does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have." (pg. 5)

Other quotes that give further insight into the mystery of the illness:
"The world was filled with pleasure and promise; I felt great. [...] I felt I could do anything, that no task was too difficult. My mind seemed clear, fabulously focused, and able to make intuitive mathematical leaps that had up to that point entirely eluded me. Indeed, they elude me still. At the time, however, not only did everything make perfect sense, but it all began to fit into a marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness. [...] Slow down, Kay." (pg. 37)
"Looking back I am amazed I survived, that I survived on my own, and that high school contained such complicated life and palpable death. I aged rapidly during those months, as one must with such loss of one's self, with such proximity to death, and such distance from shelter." (pg. 40)
"Shyness does, and the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against - you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality." (pg. 67)
"Fragments of ideas, images, sentences, raced around and around in my mind like the tigers in a children's story. Finally, like those tigers, they became meaningless melted pools. Nothing once familiar to me was familiar. I wanted desperately to slow down but could not. Nothing helped - not running around a parking lot for hours on end or swimming for miles. My energy level was untouched by anything I did. Sex became too intense for pleasure, and during it I would feel my mind encased by black lines of light that were terrifying to me. My delusions centered on the slow painful deaths of all the green plants in the world - vine by vine, stem by stem, leaf by leaf they died, and I could do nothing to save them. Their screams were cacophonous. Increasingly, all of my images were black and decaying." (pg. 83)
"No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy." (pg. 89)
"More fundamentally, I genuinely believed - courtesy of strong-willed parents, my own stubborness, and a WASP military upbringing - that I ought to be able to handle whatever difficulties came my way without having to rely upon crutches such as medication." (pg. 99)
"The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. 'Manic-depressive illness.' I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts on his lands and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun." (pg. 104)
"There were limits on what any of us could do for him, and it tore me apart inside. We all move uneasily within our restraints." (pg. 109)
"Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others" (pg. 112)
"Ironically, it is usually the doctors who are the most competent and conscientious who feel the most sense of failure and pain." (pg. 127)
"the positive aspects of the illness that can arise during the milder manic states: heightened energy and perceptual awareness, increased fluidity and originality of thinking, intense exhilaration of moods and experience, increased sexual desire, expansiveness of vision, and a lengthened grasp of aspiration. I tried to encourage our clinic doctors to see that this was an illness that could confer advantage as well as disadvantage, and that for many individuals these intoxicating experiences were highly addictive in nature and difficult to give up." (pg. 128)
"'Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, / Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.' But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow." (pg. 175)
"When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to re-create hope and to restore life." (pg. 215)

Madness: A Bipolar Life by Marya Hornbacher

() Bipolar 1 at it's finest. Marya dialogues her life, especially that as it is enveloped by her disease.

Throughout her existence she is continually in motion, in and out of manic, depression, mixed, and various other extreme episodes. She's harbored all the bad behaviors - at their worst - to "cope": alcoholism, eating disorders, self-injury, drug use... She's been in hospitals and clinics innumerable times. It's hard to believe she's still alive with what she's been through.

She uses this book to help communicate the very real symptoms, and dangers, of the disease. The chronicles of her own struggles helps educate us on the nature of the disorder, and perhaps help us see the humanity that is still present in those strongly afflicted by it.

Yes, I did listen to this as an audio book. I used Google E-Reader to find the few quotes I noted.
"I want to be superwoman, and the fact that I'm not makes me hate myself and constantly wonder why I'm such a waste." (pg. 106)
"I don't deserve him. He's too good. I put my head down on the table and cry. Because it's happened again. I'm found out. I'm damaged. Fucked up. Broken. A fraud. I knew he would find out sooner or later that I was impossible to love." (pg. 103)
"Sometimes, I get the uneasy feeling that I'm fooling everyone. In the middle of a gathering of friends, at a party, at a show, on a walk with Jeff, I'll remember the past. It leaves me a little shaken, bewildered by how I've gotten from there to here. I feel it in the pit of my stomach, the shame of it, the feeling that I am getting away with something, living a life I don't deserve. [...] and everyone loves the woman I'm pretending to be, not me. Who would love me? I hate the person I was. She disgusts me, [...] she was a monster. She was sick. Suddenly I can feel her in me, like bile in my throat. I can't let her out. The spell will break, and she will take over again. I want to forget her. I want her dead. [...] If I am very good, they'll let me stay, and soon, if I work hard enough, I will belong." (pg. 162)
"I'm a little overwhelmed, so I keep smiling, figuring it can't hurt." (pg. 163)
"2.8% of U.S. population has bipolar disorder [...] 25% of bipolar patients have attempted suicide." (pg. 281)

Manic by Terri Cheney

() This book does a good job of putting you front-and-center in the life of a manic depressive. The author was formerly a successful lawyer that had to fight and hide her shocking depressive and manic episodes.

She was driven to uncontrollable behaviors such as eating raw cooking materials like flour and baking soda. In her depression she was often immobile and had no appetite, but would scourge through dumpsters when the urge to eat finally came up.

In her mania, as is often with Bipolar I women, she'd become sexually promiscuous. During her mixed episodes, she attempted suicide many times.

She tried a lot of different drugs and pharmaceutical combinations. She even went through electroshock therapy, which completely screwed with her memory. She shows the tortuous urges she had to continually fight against, and the circumstances that many of them caused her to end up in, including being raped.

It's a good look into the experiences of the author. But for some reason I feel like something is missing to make this a more complete, rewarding book. But that's just my opinion, not the New York Times Bestseller list's, obviously.

"But the disease thrives on shame, and shame thrives on silence, and I've been silent long enough." (pg. 3)
"The only word I couldn't seem to say was 'no.' [...] Manic sex isn't really intercourse. It's discourse, just another way to ease the insatiable need for contact and communication. In place of words, I simply spoke with my skin." (pg. 7)
"There's nothing quite like breaking something - the law, a pane of glass, whatever - to embolden a manic mood." (pg. 11)
"Manic intentions are always good; manic consequences, almost never." (pg. 13)
"The world is essentially bipolar: driven to extremes but defined by flux. Saints are always just a stumble away from sinners. Nothing is absolute, not even death." (pg. 20)
"depression was my secret admirer, and had been for years, [...] I never knew when depression would come to call, or for how long, or how dangerous it would be. I only knew that I had to keep it secret or else. Or else what, I wasn't quite sure, nor was I willing to find out." (pg. 24)
"Stories don't always have to end happily, I realized. Sometimes it's just enough that they end, to make way for new stories." (pg. 29)
"Happiness is fine, in its season, happiness out of season is a sure harbinger of doom. That's why you should never trust a bright blue sky in November. It might tempt you out the door. It might lure you to forget, for a moment or two, that it is in fact the dead of winter [...] How could I ever hope to tell a normal person about the terrors of being happy? [...] what felt like happy now might well be too happy in a minute - and we all knew where too happy could lead." (pg. 33)
"Terribly, terribly happy was quickly dissolving into not so terribly comfortable. How absolutely marvelous. How thrilling. Probably nobody but a manic-depressive can understand that putting on the brakes is something far more exhilarating than winning the race." (pg. 41)
"True beauty, I realized, is not the absence of ugliness, but the acceptance of it." (pg. 88)
"What right did I have to my own despair, with such genuine suffering before me? I looked around me at the pockmarked children, and all I could think was, a six-figure lifestyle drove me to suicide. It's chemical, I told myself. I didn't choose to be manic depressive." (pg. 111)
"But mostly I long for sustenance - a sense of fullness, an absence of ache. It's a primal hunger, that goes beyond food: what I really crave is normalcy." (pg. 203)
"Well, if it wasn't for my manic depression, there would be no me for him to marry, period. I'd be some other person entirely. I wouldn't have those flashes of brilliance he so admired, that made him want me in the first place. I wouldn't have the volatility that maddened but intrigued him. Alan hated ordinary. That's just what I would be." (pg. 217)