An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [20]
St. Andrews provided a gentle forgetfulness over the preceding painful years of my life. It remains a haunting and lovely time to me, a marrow experience. For one who during her undergraduate years was trying to escape an inexplicable weariness and despair, St. Andrews was an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances. Throughout and beyond a long North Sea winter, it was the Indian summer of my life.
I was twenty-one years old when I left Scotland and returned to UCLA. It was an abrupt shift in mood and surroundings, and an even more abrupt disruption to the pace of my life. I tried to settle back into my old world and routines but found it difficult to do so. For a year I had been free of having to work twenty or thirty hours a week in order to support myself, but now I once again had to juggle my work, classes, social life, and disruptive moods. My career plans also had changed. It had become clear to me over time that my mercurial temperament and physical restlessness were going to make medical school—especially the first two years, which required sitting still in lecture halls for hours at a time—an unlikely proposition. I found it difficult to stay put for long and found that I learned best on my own. I loved research and writing, and the thought of being chained to the kind of schedule that medical school required was increasingly repugnant. As important, I had read William James’s great psychological study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, during my year in St. Andrews and had become completely captivated by the idea of studying psychology, especially individual differences in temperament and variations in emotional capacities, such as mood and intense perceptions. I also had begun working with a second professor on his research grant, a fascinating study of the psychological and physiological effects of mood-altering drugs such as LSD, marijuana, cocaine, opiates, barbiturates, and amphetamines. He was particularly interested in why some individuals were drawn to one class of drugs, for example, the hallucinogens, while others gravitated toward drugs that dampened or elevated mood. He, like me, was intrigued by moods.
This professor—a tall, shy, brilliant man—was himself inclined to quick and profound mood swings. I found working for him, first as a research assistant and then as a doctoral student, an extraordinary experience: he was immensely creative, curious, and open-minded; difficult but fair in his intellectual demands; and exceptionally kind in understanding my own fluctuating moods and attentiveness. We had a kind of intuition about one another that was, for the most part, left unsaid, although occasionally one or the other of us would bring up the subject of black moods. My office was adjacent to his, and he would, during my depressed times, ask about how I was feeling, comment that I looked tired or pensive or discouraged, and ask what he could do to help.
One day in our discussions we found out that each of us had been rating our own moods—he on a 10-point scale of subjective ratings ranging from “terrible” to “great,” and me on a scale ranging from -3 (paralytic and entirely despairing) to +3 (magnificent mood and vitality), in an attempt to discover some sort of rhyme or reason to their comings and goings. Now and again we would talk about the possibility of taking antidepressant medications, but we were deeply skeptical that they would work and wary of potential side effects. Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. Antidepressants might be indicated for psychiatric patients, for those of weaker stock, but not for us. It was a costly attitude; our upbringing and pride held