Jaime Lowe > Quotes

“Mary Karr once wrote, “In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Matt and I had one constant—each other. I didn’t have a problem being independent from my parents, but being separated from Matthew felt like a psychic wound. I think Dr. Viscott would have labeled it a regression or a psychotic break or separation anxiety.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“One of the first examples of hysteria was observed by Thomas Sydenham in 1681.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Tom Waits’s song “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a coal miner’s croaky anthem to regression, to the freedom of inhibition and youth. I think in a lot of ways, breakdowns are both a resistance to growing up and an acceleration of maturity.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“When I asked my mom if there were ever any indications or hints at bipolar, she just laughed and said, “Well, you were a very dramatic kid.” Then went on to describe a typical scenario. At dinner, I might be kicking Matthew under the table and my mom said she would send me to my room for punishment. Outraged, I would throw my napkin on the floor and march up the stairs to my room and slam the door. Thirty seconds later, she remembered me emerging red with rage spreading across my freckled face and screaming, “AND I’M NEVER COMING BACK.” Then I would slam the door again, extra hard. About three minutes would pass and I would be back at the table eating homemade pizza. My mom said it was hard not to laugh at me, the tiny fury. “But that was just my personality, right?” I asked her. “Yeah, I mean that doesn’t seem bipolar to me, that just seemed like you.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“said. We talked about how we have ways of measuring the heart, blood pressure, ways to map the body with numbers and guidelines—I explained that from my experience it seemed like tracking mood was impossible. Dr. Angst countered that he and others had developed a series of questions—the Hypomania Checklist, a thirty-two-question self-assessment survey. I thought back to my adolescent self-assessment and was wary. If you are manic, you are likely to answer delusionally. And what could a survey really show? And that seemed to be the crux of why treatment is so hard—there’s no way for a doctor, especially a doctor just meeting a patient for the first time, to be able to identify what is manic for one person versus manic for another. For all Dr. Angst knew, I was not a writer, not working on a book at all, and that I was in the throes of an episode, interviewing experts as part of a manic episode. And maybe I was? I was eating barrels full of pasta, talking to random strangers, and I was here for a slightly bizarre and complicated purpose, almost grandiose.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“For mental health coverage and the study of it to advance at all, physical health needs to be regarded as something that encompasses both body and mind. Angst and his holistic approach to psychiatric health remain the gold standard. But health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industrial complex don’t seem remotely interested in pursuing a health care system that would actually contribute to overall health. In fact, the labyrinthine process for reimbursement, coverage, rules, and regulations for both doctors and patients amplifies mental illness and anxiety. Every time I’m put on hold or puzzle through a pharmaceutical query, my back tightens, my jaw locks, and I have to calm myself down and coach myself through it. Most of the time I give up.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“When he was young, Angst picked up his father’s entomology hobby, and noticed that butterflies that came from different altitudes had different wing patterns. He experimented by taking low-altitude butterfly larvae and birthing them in freezing temperatures in the refrigerators of the city slaughterhouse. The result: a high-altitude wing pattern. That was the beginning of his belief that health—including mental health—was a holistic issue, affected by environmental factors that shifted the expression of genes.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“correctional officers”
― Jaime Lowe, Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires

“the girls”
― Jaime Lowe, Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California's Wildfires

“mania is more like unbridled dizzying love or the first sparkling spring day when daffodils are bursting and everything is coated in warm rays and looking like a rainbow paradise, prisms of iridescence beaming.) Being bipolar meant I had access to the other side. But there were still functional kinks to work out—living with daily tasks was sometimes a challenge.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“The Merck Manual defines Bipolar I as manic patients who are “inexhaustibly, excessively, and impulsively involved in various pleasurable, high-risk activities (e.g., gambling, dangerous sports, promiscuous sexual activity) without insight into possible harm. Symptoms are so severe that they impair functioning; unwise investments, spending sprees, and other personal choices may have irreparable consequences.” Yes, on all of that. This was full-blown mania, round two.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“An estimated 50 percent of the world’s lithium supply lies beneath the Salar de Uyuni in southern Bolivia. The increasing global demand for lithium has prompted many proclamations, including claims by Bolivians that the landlocked socialist country will become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” The danger of relying on any natural resource for national income is known as the “resource curse.” It seems like an almost too easy and obvious parallel to my dependence on lithium.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I asked Angst what he thought drove that special kind of creativity, and he said something I had heard before: “You are deviant in your thinking, you leave that normal pathway to jump somewhere else in your thoughts, and that is creative. Being unconventional in your emotional jumps, you go away from the usual in a positive sense.” In Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote about how Robert Lowell’s madness was inspiration for his poetry and then later braided his experiences into his work when he was lucid enough to actually write.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Peer counseling may even be more effective than some talk therapy, especially for teens. Adolescence is so isolating; we learned how to talk to each other and we learned how to listen.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“What actually was taking place on a more realistic level was the beginning of a two-month manic cycle. I believed everything I spouted (I am God! I am a rock star! I love you! And you!) to be true. I remembered most of it; I had no inhibitions or boundaries or fear. My family, meanwhile, was scrambling to make shit work and to make sure I didn’t accidentally set everything on fire—physically or metaphorically.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“In mania I spent a great deal of money for things I didn’t need . . . flights of fancy, meaning almost delusions of grandeur. You feel euphoric, you feel nothing you do has any kind of negative consequence. You can go anywhere, say anything, be anybody you want,”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“The intake report said what was already obvious to everyone around me: I was exhibiting an “increased psychomotor rate, decreased need for sleep (about two to three hours a night), racing thoughts and paranoid ideation regarding her parents following her and watching her, as well as taping the phone calls that she was making.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I’m not sure what I thought I could absorb from sitting there on yellowed grass and in minimal shade—a return to a Roman time when melancholia and mania was first thought of and considered? Or just a sense of the reliance and importance that this society once placed on relaxation? It used to be a sign of empirical strength to be able to build such an enormous and architecturally complicated complex devoted to leisure, to calming the mind.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I was depressed, alone, bored, but I still had fantasies. I only had fantasy. Recent studies have shown that one of the main characteristics that separate humans from animals is the ability to think and plan and fantasize about a future.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“It’s also thought that mineral springs in France have unnaturally high amounts of lithium. More lithium in the waters, less need to medicate people because they’re getting small doses every day. Lithium may be the true reason why the French can sit in cafés for hours, eat cheese, and sip coffee slowly. They may, in fact, have a natural lithium chill embedded in their geography.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“even if you could measure mental illness, you couldn’t define normal based on statistics. An individual is much more complex.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“In 1887 the journalist Nellie Bly, a pen name for Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, published an account of her undercover experience as a patient at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum,”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“In 2008 when George W. Bush signed the Mental Health Parity Act into law, it required all insurers to cover behavioral health the same way plans covered any other type of medical treatment; but insurance companies found loopholes and ways to circumvent coverage. Years later, when Obamacare was implemented, in a significant move toward parity, it forbade health plans from rejecting people with preexisting conditions—including mental illness and addiction. “We have made progress expanding mental health coverage and elevating the conversation about mental health,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “But too many people still do not get the help they need.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“But I was not born in an era when the mentally ill were pitied and hopeless; I was born in an era when the medical field was beginning to understand and to treat mental illness, an era when mental illness has almost been fetishized. Doctors could identify symptoms and prescribe remedies, which was a relatively new method. Just a few months before I was hospitalized, public figures like Patty Duke, who had published her book A Brilliant Madness, were emerging to talk about and advocate on behalf of this newly recognized group of people. Wild people, tamed with pills, who were reintroduced into civilian life.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“I had no friends, but I felt communion with these characters—an innate belief in self was our shared symptom. That concept is particularly complicated for a teenager—to be told that confidence is a sign of sickness—at the very time when you are losing all confidence anyway. It’s like a double hit of shattered self-esteem. I was already cowed by adolescence and now I was hyperaware of hyperactivity, of feeling too good, too complicated, too much.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“In 2014, Dr. Anna Fels wrote an op-ed titled “Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?” for the New York Times. And sometimes I think, yes, we should. There would be less aggression, suicide, and a calmer state of mind. Some experts have heralded lithium as the next fluoride, especially after scientists found that suicide rates were lower in areas where the drinking water had higher concentrations of the element. In the October 4, 1971, issue of the New York Times Magazine, a feature was published called “The Texas Tranquilizer,” in which University of Texas biochemist Earl B. Dawson claimed that El Paso had lower rates of suicide and crime and fewer admissions to mental hospitals than Dallas because their water supply was heavily laced with lithium. For”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Researchers now have come close to identifying why lithium functions as a mood stabilizer—it affects the levels of serotonin that act as a messenger regulating aspects of the nervous system such as sleep, memory, appetite, mood, sex, endocrine function. And studies have found that when lithium is prescribed chronically (for more than three weeks), the increase in serotonin is focused in the hippocampus rather than scattered all over the brain.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“Bad Kissingen was just one of many spa towns in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century. In an October issue of the Lancet from 1894, a doctor examined the effects of lithium-rich waters in the Welsh region of Llangammarch, concluding that the water was certainly therapeutic, if not curative for a variety of illnesses. At the turn of the century therapeutic waters were all the rage.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind

“He was intrigued, addicted to the mania, and devoted, following me around with his video camera, recording impromptu dance recitals and monologues. Mania or even the beginnings of mania will do this. There’s a magnetism to that kind of high, and I knew I could draw people to me. I had drawn in Mike.”
― Jaime Lowe, Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind