A Linked-In connection had this on a blog, that may give us all cause to pause when we are apt to be critical --- Kay Redfield Jamison’s book, Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Kay, who also has bipolar disorder, is a professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The following quote and its source say it all. “Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings…. the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of all arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art…. So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense … madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.” – Socrates, in his speech on divine madness in Phaedrus, said: Over 2,000 years have passed and we’re still struggling to see mental illness in its proper perspective when the Greeks already understood it. Now, that’s pathetic. British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill’s historians credit his bipolar disorder with helping him to see Hitler and Germany as a great threat while his peers in the British Cabinet and in Parliament simply sought to appease the Fuhrer. Churchill correctly saw that they couldn’t, as I see what you can’t. Great Britain needed Churchill and you need me.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Jul 2013 12:43:53 +0000
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