An Unquiet Mind

Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind (1995) is a memoir by a clinical psychologist who is also a leading academic authority on manic-depressive illness, now called bipolar disorder. Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, opens with her childhood in a military family that moved frequently, and describes her first severe manic episode in her late teens and early twenties, when she experienced euphoric energy, grandiosity, and insomnia alternating with crushing depressions. As a graduate student in psychology at UCLA, she studied mood disorders while concealing her own illness, a double life that structures much of the book. The memoir recounts her decision to begin lithium treatment after years of resistance, her fear that medication would dull her creativity and intensity, and her eventual acceptance that lithium stabilized her life even as it muted some of the heightened feelings she associated with her manic states. Jamison also writes about her work on the National Institute of Mental Health’s collaborative study on the psychobiology of depression, her friendship and professional rivalry with other mood-disorder researchers, and the suicide of a close colleague. The book’s distinctive contribution is its argument that clinicians who treat mood disorders should understand the illness from the inside, and that patients and doctors alike must confront the seductive appeal of mania alongside its destructiveness. It remains a foundational first-person account in psychiatry.