Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind is an exhilarating and brave
memoir. It is about her manic depressive disorder and how Jamison
plays the deck of cards the hereditary illness has dealt her.
Happily though, life also dealt her an imaginative and loving
family whose "great ability to love and learn, listen and
change...helped keep me alive through all the years of pain and
nightmare that were to come."
Dr. Jamison is a professor of
psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She
has written several books on manic depressive illness (including
the standard medical text); received a number of awards for
research on this disease; and has been regarded as a compassionate
exorciser of that awful demon. But with the publication of this
book, she risks her reputation and emerges as one who holds that
demon inside herself as well. This "coming out" challenges the
conservative nature of our medical system, violating the
comfortable equation we in America have that: a physician is by
natural law healthy. An Unquiet Mind tells of the writer's
coming to terms with her vulnerability. In so doing, Jamison
returns to a more basic equation: physician heal thyself.
This wonderful and informative book satisfies in several ways. Readers who
are lovers of literature and poetry will be interested in her
assertion that much of romanticism in literature is a manifestation of
a manic sensibility. Her enormous insight in this area allows us to
stand outside the violent exaltation and quicksilver highs of
romantic literature and appreciate the clinical awfulness of such
obsessive preoccupations.
Along the same lines, the book illuminates
how hypersensitive ways of seeing and experiencing natural phenomena
and human experience can bring us, through the eyes of the artist, to
extraordinary truth about the concrete world. This is underscored by
much beautiful writing. Her prose is
reminiscent of Van Gogh in his diaries--full of color and
painterly description. In considering the worlds of art and literature, Dr. Jamison walks along the cusp of the human mind where imagination and reality must co-exist.
The Unquiet Mind is most importantly, however, a book
that is a great combination of an interesting life lived and related
by an excellent writer. It is the story of a woman succeeding in a
male dominated profession, a woman combatting first her depression
then the cure. It chronicles her ultimate surrender to that cure
(lithium) which takes away the otherworldly wonders of the mania.
Ultimately, it is a story of a woman who refuses to lie and to hide,
and it is a story of the redemptive power of love: "That night,
before we went to bed, I told David about my manic depressive illness.
I dreaded what his reaction would be...I wished I had never told him;
I wished I was normal...I felt like an idiot for hoping that anyone
could accept what I had just said and resigned myself to a subtle
round of polite farewells...Finally, after eternity had ticked to a
close, David turned to me, put his arms around me and said
softly,'Rotten luck'. I was overcome with relief I also was
struck by the absolute truth of what he had just said. It was
rotten luck, and somebody finally understood."
