As they crash through the parking lot, a campus policeman pulls up and asks who they are and what they're doing. While she was still charged with energy, her companion had crashed an hour earlier and just wanted to go home. She and a colleague from the medical school race furiously around, looking for their car after an evening of drinking, fighting, laughing, and general hysteria associated with one of her manic episodes. To set the mood of the book, Jamison opens with a scene in the UCLA Medical Center parking lot at 2 a.m. A professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Jamison had learned to manage her disease and become a world expert on manic-depression by the age of forty. I think that is something we all need more of.In this emotionally-charged memoir, Kay Redfield Jamison recounts, not only her own struggles with manic-depressive illness (also known as bipolar mood disorder), but also how she has been able to use her disease to treat others similarly affected and to crusade for better understanding of the illness. I’m tired of bipolar stories that are all chaos, it’s true that chaos comes with the disorder and is part of the story, but it doesn’t have to be all of it, Jamison story has it’s chaos but it also has it’s stability, it’s silver lining. It touching the essence of bipolar disorder while also proving that bipolar individuals can function and excel in difficult academic and scientific fields. It didn’t have all the academic jargon and it had a better flow for lack of statistics.Īnd even though our experiences were vastly different, it was lovely and relatable. They both have their place, but for obvious reasons An Unquiet Mind was a much easier read.
I had somehow started with the scholarly book and missed the memoir. This is the second book I’ve reviewed by Kay Redfield Jamison, the first one I did, Touched By Fire, about the link between manic depressive illness and creativity, you can find here.Īn Unquiet Mind is perhaps the most popular of Jamison’s book, when speaking about Touched By Fire I had multiple people ask me if I had read this book, and I hadn’t. The personal memoir of a manic depressive and an authority on the subject describes the onset of the illness during her teenage years and her determined journey through the realm of available treatments.
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