Kay Jamison An Unquiet Mind

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What would have made An Unquiet Mind better? To say nothing of the outstanding work and writing style of Dr. Jamison, this is a piss poor audiobook. I happened to have my paperback version (bought the book to stick notes in for a class I am in) on me when I was listening to the final parts, and I decided to try and follow along with her narration. Kay Redfield Jamison shared her personal journey with bipolar disorder in her book, An Unquiet Mind. “When you’re high, it’s tremendous. Ideas are fast and frequent, like shooting stars.

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Kay Jamison An Unquiet Mind

Mental health disorders affect millions of people and often lead to the tragic loss of life through suicide. The pain and suffering that accompany mental illness are difficult for those unafflicted to understand. Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist living with manic-depressive disorder, has attempted to bring awareness to those experiences in her memoir. By divulging the violent, frenzied, and dangerous aspects of her disease, Jamison hopes to create more understanding about mental illness and more empathy for those who struggle to exist in the normal world.

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Kay Redfield Jamison An Unquiet Mind Quotes

With the highs of mania come the dangerous lows of depression. After Jamison dropped into her first major depressive state, she started to hallucinate. The images she saw all related to death and decay. She became frightened and finally decided to seek treatment.

Jamison started seeing a psychiatrist she knew from her doctoral program. He was kind and professional, and he was too smart to be outwitted. He listened to Jamison’s excuses about her behavior, then very politely informed her she had manic-depressive disorder. He prescribed lithium to help.

Jamison took the lithium at first, but the dosage was too high, and she started to experience negative side effects. She lost her ability to read and concentrate. She was nauseous and sick often, and the effects of the drug made her appear drunk in public. In addition to these side effects, the lithium worked by dulling the edges of both her heightened mind and the shadows of depression. She lost her energy and enthusiasm for life, and as a result, she lost a part of who she was.

Kay Jamison An Unquiet Mind

These factors made Jamison stop and start her medication many times. The consequence was an 18-month battle with suicidal depression. Somewhere in the middle of those months, she lost the battle and attempted to take her life by overdosing on lithium.

Love in the Time of Madness

After her suicide attempt, Jamison started taking her lithium faithfully. Her moods started to stabilize, but she was still raw from the pain of wanting to die. Her marriage ended for good, but a new love entered her life. This love would save her in many ways.

David was a visiting professor at UCLA from London. He and Jamison fell in love quickly and started a romance that straddled two continents. His kindness and care for her after learning about her disease made her realize that tolerance was possible. She felt protected and accepted, and she started to heal parts of her she thought were broken forever.

A year after she started dating David, he died from a heart attack. Jamison assumed the grief would send her into a tailspin, but it didn’t. She focused on work and accepted the inevitability of death. Her grief started to fade, but her love for him never did.

David’s love and that of others along the way helped parts of her old self awaken. She still experienced mood swings, but they were less intense and more manageable. She realized most of her life was spent surviving, not living, and she decided to pursue the latter. She lowered her dose of lithium and regained her ability to enjoy life again.

Kay redfield jamison website

Years later, she met her second husband, Richard, a prominent researcher in schizophrenia and the Chief of Neurosurgery at the National Institute of Mental Health in Washington, D.C. Richard was vastly different in personality and interests than Jamison. Where she was quick to anger, he was calm and reserved. He had no patience for poetry or the performing arts, two things that sustained Jamison’s life. Although her moods were often too much for Richard to handle, he always provided a solid foundation of love. His unwavering unconditional love taught Jamison that a predictable life was far more enriching than a life of reckless passion.

Coming Out

Jamison had many fears about informing others about her illness. Over the course of her career, she told fellow co-workers to ensure a safeguard against any impairments of her patient care. But she strongly feared professional backlash from others. She didn’t want her objectivity as a researcher to be questioned or for her students to fear insulting her during discussions of mental illness. But keeping the secret somehow constituted shame. Although she was ashamed of how her behavior had affected those in her personal life, she was not ashamed of her disease.

After moving to Washington to live with Richard, Jamison became interested in genetic mapping of precursors to mental illness. She knew that people might use another’s predisposition to mental illness against them. But she also thought knowing who carried the gene would tremendously help early diagnosis and targeted treatment. Her work has surrounded brain imaging to determine the causes of mental health disorders.

Jamison’s moods balanced out, and she was able to have optimism for her future again. However, even with all the suffering and damage her illness caused, she wouldn’t wish it away. Her manic episodes gave her deep, passionate experiences unattainable to the normal mind. She pushed the boundaries of her mind and found comfort in the knowledge that there was more still to discover. She knows that lithium saved her life, but more so, love is what gave her the strength to keep living.

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An Unquiet Mind

Genre: Memoir

Annotated by:
Aull, Felice
Unquiet
  • Date of entry: May-31-2001
  • Last revised: Oct-06-2015

Summary

The author, Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is an authority on manic depressive illness. With this powerful, well-written memoir she 'came out of the closet,' publicly declaring that she herself had suffered from manic depressive illness for years. Jamison describes the manifestations of her illness, her initial denial and resistance to treatment with medication, attempted suicide, and her struggle to maintain an active professional and satisfying personal life.The author was 'intensely emotional as a child,' (p.4) and in high school first experienced 'a light lovely tincture of true mania' (p.37) during which she felt marvelous, but following which she was unable to concentrate or comprehend, felt exhausted, preoccupied with death, and frightened. (pp. 36-40) Interested in medicine as an adolescent, she pursued her goal in spite of mood swings and periods of mental paralysis. Jamison completed graduate work in clinical psychology; shortly after obtaining a faculty appointment 'I was manic beyond recognition and just beginning a long, costly personal war against a medication that I would, in a few year’s time, be strongly encouraging others to take [lithium].' (p. 4)Jamison eventually, through strong support from friends and colleagues, excellent psychiatric care, and her own acceptance of illness, has been able to reach a state of relative equilibrium--tolerable levels of medication (fewer side effects) and dampened mood swings. But she makes clear that she must stay on lithium and remain vigilant.

Commentary

Jamison’s purpose in writing this illness narrative is to inform, educate, and advocate. By revealing her condition, Jamison took professional and personal risks, which she thoughtfully considers here. She is well aware that there may be questions of professional responsibility and competence, and discusses how these issues were handled.The author’s descriptions of how she felt during the manic and depressive stages of her illness are vivid and gripping. She makes us understand the seductiveness of the manic state--its intensity, the exuberance and energy it bestowed, how difficult it was to give that up by taking lithium. And Jamison also paints powerful pictures of anti-social behavior, black periods, the inability to work, and the disabling side effects of lithium.Jamison’s paradoxical struggle to deny her own illness and avoid drug therapy is not uncommon among medical professionals. It is also not unusual to find health care workers who have themselves suffered from the disease they become expert in treating. The author’s insights, intelligence, and fluid prose shed new light on these phenomena and provide the reader unusual access to a devastating condition.

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