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By Root 482 0

performed, the erratic ways that one took to get there were considerably less important. I was married, too, by this point, to a French artist who not only was a talented painter but an exceedingly kind and gentle person. He and I had met in the early seventies, at a brunch given by mutual friends. It was a time of long hair, social unrest, graduate school deferments, and Vietnam War protests, and I was relieved to find someone who was, for a switch, essentially apolitical, highly intelligent but unintellectual, and deeply committed to the arts. We were very different, but we liked one another immediately; we found out quickly that we shared a passionate love for painting, music, and the natural world. I was, at the time, painfully intense, rail thin, and, when not moribund, filled to the brim with a desire for an exciting life, a high-voltage academic career, and a pack of children. Photographs from that time show a tall, extraordinarily handsome, dark-haired, gentle, and brown-eyed man who, while consistent in his own appearance, is accompanied by a wildly variable woman in her midtwenties: in one picture laughing, in a floppy hat, with long hair flying; in another pensive, brooding, looking infinitely older, far more soberly and boringly dressed. My hair, like my moods, went up and down: long for a time, until an I-look-like-a-toad mood would sweep over me; thinking a radical change might help, I then would have it cut to a bob. The moods, the hair, the clothes all changed from week to week, month to month. My husband, on the other hand, was steady, and in most ways we ended up complementing one another’s temperaments.

Within months of our meeting we were living together in a small apartment near the ocean. It was a quiet, normal sort of existence, filled with movies, friends, and trips to Big Sur, San Francisco, and Yosemite. The safety of our marriage, the closeness of good friends, and the intellectual latitude provided by graduate school were very powerful in providing a reasonably quiet and harbored world.

I had started off studying experimental psychology, especially the more physiological and mathematical sides of the field, but after several months of clinical studies at the Maudsley Hospital in London—which I had completed just prior to meeting my husband—I decided to switch to clinical psychology. I had an increasing personal, as well as professional, interest in the field. My course work, which had focused on statistical methods, biology, and experimental psychology, now switched to psychopharmacology, psychopathology, clinical methods, and psychotherapy. Psychopathology—the scientific study of mental disorders—proved enormously interesting, and I found that seeing patients was not only fascinating but intellectually and personally demanding. Despite the fact that we were being taught how to make clinical diagnoses, I still did not make any connection in my own mind between the problems I had experienced and what was described as manic-depressive illness in the textbooks. In a strange reversal of medical-student syndrome, where students become convinced that they have whatever disease it is they are studying, I blithely went on with my clinical training and never put my mood swings into any medical context whatsoever. When I look back on it, my denial and ignorance seem virtually incomprehensible. I noticed, though, that I was more comfortable treating psychotic patients than were many of my colleagues.

At that time, in clinical psychology and psychiatric residency programs, psychosis was far more linked to schizophrenia than manic-depressive illness, and I learned very little about mood disorders in any formal sense. Psychoanalytic theories still predominated. So for the first two years of treating patients, I was supervised almost entirely by psychoanalysts; the emphasis in treatment was on understanding early experiences and conflicts; dreams and symbols, and their interpretation, formed the core of psychotherapeutic work. A more medical approach to psychopathology—one that centered on diagnosis, symptoms,