Divided Minds: Twin Sisters and Their Journey Through Schizophrenia by Pamela Spiro Wagner and Carolyn S. Spiro, M.D.

() So there is no argument that severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, have genetic bases. Why then, in this case of identical twins, is one twin debilitated by the disease while the other twin grows up to become a well-respected psychiatrist?

In the early part of the book, it gives the idea that the twins may have, in fact, been feeling similar symptoms. However, Pamela's got worse while Carolyn's dissipated completely. This gives us insight into the role of environment and reactions thereto that can help trigger or harvest any predispositions to illness. It also, like the mental disorder memoirs I read before it, keeps with a theme of isolation. The disease is related to the individual disconnecting from all the people around them. They soon lose the ability to feel any sort of human connection, or trust.

It is both sad and rewarding to read. Pamela, the twin diagnosed as schizophrenic, has intelligence and potential. When she was younger, she was more highly appraised and hoped for than Carolyn, her sister. Also, while in and out of mental institutions, she won incredibly high awards for her poetry. She is a talented woman inflicted with horrendous schizophrenia. She carries the guilt of JFK's death; she thinks she's his murderer. There is even a point where she lights herself on fire. But, "Even in my most evil moments, moments when I feel that I need to destroy myself to save the world, I am still trying to preserve others." (pg. 314 - Pamela)

"You keep patients from isolating, because isolation is what has made them sick and, if allowed to continue, isolating will make problems more difficult." (pg.138 - Pamela's doctor)
"I stare into the bright fire and try to open up for the first time. Although I talk in riddles as usual, whenever I clam up, not wanting to bore him, he urges me on. [...] Carefully, I pull away, not because I recoil at the contact but because I'm certain he'd never touch me voluntarily or without disgust if awake. [...] I'm left to wonder what his liking me means. I know he hugged me on impulse and I also understand he will come quickly to regret it. Nevertheless, even the sneers of the voices can't deprive me completely of the bubbly, euphoric feeling in my chest." (pg 156 - Pamela)
"She sounds like she cares and believes what she says. I don't respond, but I'm listening. Something's different - for the first time someone actually wants me to talk about things and doesn't seem prepared to discount or dismiss me as crazy. And so, for the first time in my life, I finally tell another person everything: about the voices and the Strangeness, about my experience of the other dimensions and alternate reality, about Gray Crinkled Paper." (pg. 201-202 - Pamela)
"I am so lonely for human company that I collect stray people as indiscriminatingly as I collect cats. I barely know them, but they seem so needy that I invite them to stay with me, no questions asked. I just want to help. I don't think about who they are or where they came from, even though Lynnie tells me I need to protect myself before I offer the shirt off my back to any thief or con artist. She doesn't understand it makes me feel good when I'm able to rescue people more desperate than I. After all, any one of them could be Jesus Christ. [...] Most of these encounters end badly, though I don't understand why." (pg. 227-228 - Pamela)
"It's like an episode of The Twilight Zone. Am I going crazy? Are they trying to drive me crazy? But no one explains it to me, I can't even ask if I've passed the test or finished the experiment, because that would only bring denials by the very same nurses and aides and doctors who have it set up. Worse, they'd use my questions as an excuse to give me more drugs or impose stricter monitoring. [...] Somebody has tampered with reality, and since I don't know who, no one can be excluded. To be on the safe side I have to assume that everyone is the enemy." (pg. 261 - Pamela)
"I thought I was used to her. I thought I'd gotten used to what schizophrenia, medication, and the years of not taking care of herself had done to her. I thought I was accustomed to the incessant movement of her hands, the sometimes violent rocking of her body. I thought I was used to her chain-smoking and the peculiar self-absorbed habits of her solitary life. [...] It's hard to believe this is the twin sister I kept on a pedestal for years, Pammy the brilliant, creative one, the smarter, more special version of me. It is still impossible to reconcile my memories of her with the person schizophrenia has so wrecked." (pg. 268-269 - Carolyn)

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)

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)