An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [1]
An unquiet mind / Kay Redfield Jamison.— 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-49848-9
1. Jamison, Kay R.—Mental health. 2. Manic-depressive psychoses—Patients—United States—Biography. 3. Women college teachers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
RC516.J363 1995
616.89’5’0092—dc20
[B] 95-14273
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1_r1
For my mother,
Dell Temple Jamison
Who gave me life not
once, but countless times
I doubt sometimes whether
a quiet & unagitated life
would have suited me—yet I
sometimes long for it.
—BYRON
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
THE WILD BLUE YONDER
Part Two
A NOT SO FINE MADNESS
Part Three
THIS MEDICINE, LOVE
Part Four
AN UNQUIET MIND
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Permissions Acknowledgments
Prologue
When it’s two o’clock in the morning, and you’re manic, even the UCLA Medical Center has a certain appeal. The hospital—ordinarily a cold clotting of uninteresting buildings—became for me, that fall morning not quite twenty years ago, a focus of my finely wired, exquisitely alert nervous system. With vibrissae twinging, antennae perked, eyes fast-forwarding and fly faceted, I took in everything around me. I was on the run. Not just on the run but fast and furious on the run, darting back and forth across the hospital parking lot trying to use up a boundless, restless, manic energy. I was running fast, but slowly going mad.
The man I was with, a colleague from the medical school, had stopped running an hour earlier and was, he said impatiently, exhausted. This, to a saner mind, would not have been surprising: the usual distinction between day and night had long since disappeared for the two of us, and the endless hours of scotch, brawling, and fallings about in laughter had taken an obvious, if not final, toll. We should have been sleeping or working, publishing not perishing, reading journals, writing in charts, or drawing tedious scientific graphs that no one would read.
Suddenly a police car pulled up. Even in my less-than-totally-lucid state of mind I could see that the officer had his hand on his gun as he got out of the car. “What in the hell are you doing running around the parking lot at this hour?” he asked. A not unreasonable question. My few remaining islets of judgment reached out to one another and linked up long enough to conclude that this particular situation was going to be hard to explain. My colleague, fortunately, was thinking far better than I was and managed to reach down into some deeply intuitive part of his own and the world’s collective unconscious and said, “We’re both on the faculty in the psychiatry department.” The policeman looked at us, smiled, went back to his squad car, and drove away.
Being professors of psychiatry explained everything.
Within a month of signing my appointment papers to become an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, I was well on my way to madness; it was 1974, and I was twenty-eight years old. Within three months I was manic beyond recognition and just beginning a long, costly personal war against a medication that I would, in a few years’ time, be strongly encouraging others to take. My illness, and my struggles against the drug that ultimately saved my life and restored my sanity, had been years in the making.
For as long as I can remember I was frighteningly, although often wonderfully, beholden to moods. Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, first severely depressed as an adolescent, and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it also has been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders. The disease that has, on several occasions, nearly killed