Children need the freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury; the time spent engaged in it is not time that could be better spent in more formal educational pursuits. Play is a necessity.
There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.
Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
There is an assumption, in attaching Puritan concepts such as ‘successful’ and ‘unsuccessful’ to the awful, final act of suicide, that those who ‘fail’ at killing themselves not only are weak, but incompetent, incapable even of getting their dying quite right.
There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness… It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.
I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that’s enough.
I think that for thousands of years people have made the observation that there are certain kinds of extreme depressive states that seem to be more likely to produce philosophers, people in the arts, unusually brilliant scientists.
From a public health point of view, still the overwhelming problem is that people are not treated enough for depression; depression remains under treated.
