For years, Kay Redfield Jamison led a double life. An
international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the
few women who have achieved the status of full professor of
medicine at an American university, Jamison was harboring a secret:
she herself suffered from manic-depression. A mercurial, emotional
child and adolescent, Jamison suffered her first severe attack of
the disease at seventeen; a decade later, shortly after she joined
the UCLA faculty, her mood swings had developed into full-blown
psychosis.
In her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, Jamison tells of her battle with
the illness: the joy of the manic highs, which gave her an
omnipotent feeling of cosmic connectedness, and the terrifying
depressions, when she wanted only to die. Though she responded to
lithium, Jamison, like many patients, became addicted to the highs
of mania and resisted taking it. It was only after the disease had
destroyed her first marriage and very nearly her life that she
accepted the "rather bittersweet exchange of a comfortable and
settled present existence for a troubled but intensely lived
past"[p. 211]. An Unquiet Mind tells of how Kay Redfield Jamison
used her zeal and intensity, and her impressive intellectual gifts,
to bring the complexities of manic-depressive illness to the
world's attention. Her work has helped save countless lives.
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