Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the most courageous women of my lifetime.
That she risked all Professional standing by coming out publicly as bipolar and a medical professor, was unprecedented.

Sure she grew up with and has much greater more secure advantages than most of us. That doesn't minimize one's inner existential angst and suffering.
Kay is a brilliant, warm, witty, caring woman and scholar extraordinaire.

The intelligence thing, as I read it, is quite simply that the more you've got working 'for' you when all is well, that all can work miserably 'against' you.

I struggle with this in that sometimes I know perhaps more than is good for me sometimes. I cannot simply be passive, complacent
and wait out the depression on meds. I'm always reaching for more and get annoyed when the docs aren't up on the research and protocols we learn from in these threads.

Kay has contributed hugely to the Cause of every one of us.
Her work, studies, research, book Night Falls Fast is seminal on the highly unspoken, i.e. suicide. Nothing else in the literature comes close to her depth of inner knowing, how the mind works in those moments.
I have great appreciation and admiration for the woman, all she is.
My then young husband, Vietnam veteran, was a suicide. Kay for me helped enlighten some of those darker recesses of the mind that he never told to anyone.