An Unquiet Mind - Kay Redfield Jamison [74]
We were in an oceanfront restaurant in Malibu at the time, so—after a brief rundown on my manias, depressions, and suicide attempt—I fixed my eye on a distant pile of rocks out in the ocean and waited for his response. It was a long, cold wait. Finally, I saw tears running down his face, and, although I remember thinking at the time that it was an extreme response—particularly since I had tried to present my manias in as lighthearted a way as possible, and my depressions with some dispassion—I thought it was touching that he felt so strongly about what I had been through. Then Mouseheart, wiping away his tears, told me that he just couldn’t believe it. He was, he said, “deeply disappointed.” He had thought I was so wonderful, so strong: How could I have attempted suicide? What had I been thinking? It was such an act of cowardice, so selfish.
I realized, to my horror, that he was serious. I was absolutely transfixed. His pain at hearing that I had manic-depressive illness was, it would seem, far worse than mine at actually having it. For a few minutes, I felt like Typhoid Mary. Then I felt betrayed, deeply embarrassed, and utterly exposed. His solicitude, of course, knew no bounds. Had I really been psychotic? If so, he asked in his soft voice, with seemingly infinite concern, did I really think, under the circumstances, that I was going to be able to handle the stresses of academic life? I pointed out to him, through clenched teeth, that I had in fact handled those particular stresses for many years, and, indeed, if truth be told, I was considerably younger than he was and had, in fact, published considerably more. I don’t really remember much of the rest of the lunch, except that it was an ordeal, and that at some point, with sarcasm that managed to pass him by, I told him that he ought not to worry, that manic-depressive illness wasn’t contagious (although he could have benefited from a bit of mania, given his rather dreary, obsessive, and humorless view of the world). He squirmed in his seat and averted his eyes.
A boxed bouquet of a dozen long-stemmed red roses arrived at my clinic the next morning; an abject note of apology was tucked in at the top. It was a nice thought, I suppose, but it didn’t begin to salve the wound inflicted by what I knew had been a candid response on his part: he was normal, I was not, and—in those most killing of words—he was “deeply disappointed.”
There are many reasons why I have been reluctant to be open about having manic-depressive illness; some of the reasons are personal, many are professional. The personal issues revolve, to a large extent, around issues of family privacy—especially because the illness under consideration is a genetic one—as well as a general belief that personal matters should be kept personal. Too, I have been very concerned, perhaps unduly so, with how knowing that I have manic-depressive illness will affect peoples perception of who I am and what I do. There is a thin line between what is considered zany and what is thought to be—a ghastly but damning word—“inappropriate,” and only a sliverish gap exists between being thought intense, or a bit volatile, and being dismissively labeled “unstable.” And, for whatever reasons of personal vanity, I dread the fact that my suicide attempt and depressions will be seen by some as acts of weakness or as “neurotic.” Somehow, I don’t mind the thought of being seen as intermittently psychotic nearly as much as I mind being pigeonholed as weak and neurotic.