Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
Siri HustvedtRead
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Perception significantly influences how bipolar disorder is diagnosed, reflecting the evolving nature of psychiatric classification.
Siri Hustvedt highlights the critical relationship between perception and the diagnosis of bipolar illness, emphasizing that our understanding of such mental health conditions is not static. As society’s views evolve, so too do the categories used in psychiatric medicine, which affects how symptoms are interpreted and classified, underscoring the importance of historical context in understanding mental health.
Themes
PerceptionDiagnosisBipolarPsychiatryMental HealthMedicineEvolution
In practice
Example use cases
In a mental health seminar discussing how perceptions influence diagnosis.
More from Siri Hustvedt
All quotes →All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
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I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
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under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
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People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
Siri HustvedtRead
The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.
Siri HustvedtRead
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