"For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly although often wonderfully beholden to moods. Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, first severely depressed as an adolescent and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it has also been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders." (Prologue, pg. 5)

"Manic-depression is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering...