An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [21]
My tremendous enjoyment of and education from the work I was doing with him, the continued satisfaction in my other work with the more mathematically inclined professor with whom I had been working since my freshman year, the strong influence of William James, and the instability and restlessness of my temperament all combined to help me make up my mind to study for a Ph.D. in psychology rather than go to medical school. UCLA was then, and still is, one of the best graduate programs in psychology in the United States; I applied for admission and began my doctoral studies in 1971.
I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value. I had imagined, of course, a My Friend Flicka scenario: my horse would see me in the distance, wiggle his ears in eager anticipation, whinny with pleasure, canter up to my side, and nuzzle my breeches for sugar or carrots. What I got instead was a wildly anxious, frequently lame, and not terribly bright creature who was terrified of snakes, people, lizards, dogs, and other horses—in short, terrified of anything that he might reasonably be expected to encounter in life—thus causing him to rear up on his hind legs and bolt madly about in completely random directions. In the clouds-and-silver-linings department, however, whenever I rode him I was generally too terrified to be depressed, and when I was manic I had no judgment anyway, so maniacal riding was well suited to the mood.
Unfortunately, it was not only a crazy decision to buy a horse, it was also stupid. I may as well have saved myself the trouble of cashing my Public Health Service fellowship checks, and fed him the checks directly: besides shoeing him and boarding him—with veterinary requirements that he supplement his regular diet with a kind of horsey granola that cost more than a good pear brandy—I also had to buy him special orthopedic shoes to correct, or occasionally correct, his ongoing problems with lameness. These shoes left Gucci and Neiman-Marcus in the dust, and, after a painfully acquired but profound understanding of why people shoot horse traders, and horses, I had to acknowledge that I was a graduate student, not Dr. Dolittle; more to the point, I was neither a Mellon nor a Rockefeller. I sold my horse, as one passes along the queen of spades, and started showing up for my classes at UCLA.
Graduate school was the fun I missed as an undergraduate. It was a continuation, in some respects, of the Indian summer I enjoyed in St. Andrews. Looking back over those years with the cool clinical perspective acquired much later, I realize that I was experiencing what is so coldly and prosaically known as a remission—common in the early years of manic-depressive illness and a deceptive respite from the savagely recurrent course that the untreated illness ultimately takes—but I assumed I was just back to my normal self. In those days there were no words or disease names or concepts that could give meaning to the awful swings in mood that I had known.
Graduate school was not only relative freedom for me from my illness, but it was also freedom from the highly structured existence of undergraduate studies. Although I skipped more than half of my formal lectures, it didn’t really matter; as long as one ultimately