for Vivien

As a founder of UCLA's Affective Disorder Clinic and a co-author of a standard medical text, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison may be the foremost authority on manic-depressive illness. She is also one of its survivors. And it is this dual perspective -- as healer and healed -- that makes Jamison's memoir so lucid, learned, and profoundly affecting.

Even as she was pursuing her psychiatric training, Jamison found herself succumbing to the exhilarating highs and paralyzing lows that afflicted many of her patients. Though the disorder brought her seemingly boundless energy and mercurial creativity, it also propelled her into spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempt at suicide.

Powerfully candid, exceptionally wise, An Unquiet Mind is one of those rare books that has the power to transform lives -- and even save them.

Mary Ellen Curtin, Amazon.com
In Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist, turned a mirror on the creativity so often associated with mental illness. In this book she turns that mirror on herself. With breathtaking honesty she tells of her own manic depression, the bitter costs of her illness, and its paradoxical benefits: "There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness and terror involved in this kind of madness.... It will never end, for madness carves its own reality." This is one of the best scientific autobiographies ever written, a combination of clarity, truth, and insight into human character. "We are all, as Byron put it, differently organized," Jamison writes. "We each move within the restraints of our temperament and live up only partially to its possibilities." Jamison's ability to live fully within her limitations is an inspiration to her fellow mortals, whatever our particular burdens may be.

Whitney Scott, Booklist, August 19, 1995
Psychologist Jamison's controversial Touched with Fire (1993) explored the hypothetical link between artistic creativity and mood disorders, speculating that manic-depressive illness, which may be inherited, somehow enables art while ravaging the artist. Perhaps written in response to opponents of biological psychiatry and accusations of romanticizing the creative possibilities of serious mental illness, her new book recounts her own frightening experience as a manic depressive--a condition she regards as genetically rooted and has publicly disclosed only recently because of her professional position. Although Jamison illuminates the disorder's addictive aspects (which stem from the unusual clarity of thought and increased capabilities it can cause in the manic phase), much of her memoir recalls the horrors of intense depression, which often lead to suicide attempts, as indeed they did in her case ("My body is uninhabitable," she recalls feeling, "raging and weeping and full of destruction and wild energy gone amok" ). Her intermittent refusals to continue prescribed medication cost her relationships and threatened her sanity, but finally, she accepted a Lithium-dependent, relatively stable life. Her account is an act of both personal and professional bravery.

"The most emotionally moving book I've ever read about emotions." --William Safire, The New York Times Magazine

"An invaluable memoir of manic depression, at once medically knowledgeable, deeply human, and beautifully written ... at times poetic, at times straightforward, always unashamedly honest." --The New York Times Book Review

"Written with poetic and moving sensitivity ... a rare and insightful view of mental illness from inside the mind of a trained specialist." --Time

"A distinguished addition to the literature of mental illness, worthy of comparison to the classics in the genre, such as William Styron's Darkness Visible." --Newark Star-Ledger