An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [0]
AN UNQUIET MIND
“Written with poetic and moving sensitivity … a rare and insightful view of mental illness from inside the mind of a trained specialist.”
—Time
“Enlightening … eloquent and profound.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“A riveting portrayal of a courageous brain alternating between exhilarating highs and numbing lows.”
—James D. Watson, Nobel laureate and author of The Double Helix
“In a most intimate and powerful telling, Jamison weaves the personal and professional threads of her life together.… [She] brings us inside the disease and helps us understand manic depression.… What comes through is a remarkably whole person with the grit to defeat her disease.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A riveting read. I devoured it at a single sitting and found the book almost as compelling on a second read.… An Unquiet Mind may well become a classic.… Jamison sets an example of courage.”
—Howard Gardner, Nature
“Stunning.… I have never read a more exquisite (in both a literary and medical sense) autobiography.… This is an important, wonderful book.”
—Jackson Clarion Ledger
“Piercingly honest.… Jamison’s literary coming-out is a mark of courage.”
—People
“Brave, insightful, richly textured and chillingly authentic.”
—Boston Globe
“Extraordinary.… An Unquiet Mind must be read.”
—The New England Journal of Medicine
“A beautiful, funny, original book. Powerfully written, it is a wonderful and important account of mercurial moods and madness. I absolutely love this book.”
—Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides
“A landmark.… The combination of the intensity of her personal life and the intellectual rigor of her professional experience make the book unique.… A vibrant and engaging account of the life, love, and experience of a woman, a therapist, an academic, and a patient.”
—The British Medical Journal
“Affecting, honest, touching … fluid, felt and often lyrical.”
—Will Self, The Observer (London)
“Quite astonishing … cuts through the dead jargon and detached observations of psychiatric theory and practice to create a fiery, passionate, authentic account of the devastation and exaltation, the blindness and illumination of the psychotic experience.”
—The Sunday Times (London)
“Rises to the poetic and has a mystical touch … a courageous and fascinating book, a moving account of the life of a remarkable woman.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
“Fast-paced, startingly honest and frequently lyrical … [Jamison has] a novelist’s openness of phrase and talent for bringing character alive.”
—Scotland on Sunday
“Superbly written.… A compelling work of literature.”
—Independent on Sunday (London)
Kay Redfield Jamison
AN UNQUIET MIND
Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is the author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, and coauthor of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness, chosen in 1990 as the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the Association of American Publishers. The recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, Dr. Jamison was a member of the first National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as well as the clinical director for the Dana Consortium on the Genetic Basis of Manic-Depressive Illness. She lives in Washington, D.C.
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, OCTOBER 1996
Copyright © 1995 by Kay Redfield Jamison
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1995.
Owing to limitations of space, acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material may be found on this page.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Jamison,