An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
Kay Redfield Jamison authored An Unquiet Mind, a memoir describing the troubling existence of mental illness in her life. This autobiographical journey reached out to a world that is peopled in mental illness. She writes of her drive, emotional intensity, and passion and pain in life as she struggled with severe manic depression. This is a story with healing implications for a world that struggles to find therapeutic resolution to this debilitating illness. I will discuss some of the key elements in Jamison’s empowering voyage through life and her madness.
Jamison was an ingenious and unpredictable child. Her illness slowly transfigured her state of mind in the latter chapters of her teen years. Manic depression hit her with a serious emotional meltdown at the age of 17, thereby setting the stage for the challenges to come with her brain disease. She found addiction in the manic highs that offered feelings of grandeur and omnipotence. The other side of her diseased mind sent her plummeting into the pits of depression where she contemplated suicide—sometimes with the trigger of gun and other times standing at the ledge of a building.
The novel setting chronicles her life from childhood into adulthood. From the age of seven, in the second grade, she witnessed a terrifying plane crash, just on the outer perimeter of her elementary school campus. Her father, a pilot in the Air Force, added the fascination of flight and death, something that stuck with her. Jamison wrote, I never again looked at the sky and saw only vastness and beauty. From that afternoon on I saw that death was also and always there. One critical element that aided in her ability to cope, in adulthood, was her demonstrative, supportive family.
Even though they were a mobile-military family, her mother did her best to secure structure, along with the support of her elder brother, father, and grandmother. Kay and her brother excelled in school and extra-curricular activities. Kay found pleasure in her adolescent years. She wrote, They were to be an extremely powerful amulet, a potent and positive countervailing force against future unhappiness. Her sister, on the other hand, was self-absorbed, defiant, demanding, and lacked compassion for the families uprooted lifestyle. However, her sister could also be witty and charming, traits passed down from dad. Ms.
Jamison had an ability to cast symbolism of deft clarity, thereby creating magical images that pulled the reader in and kept their interest peaked. She described her father’s persona with eloquence, as can be seen here: When times were good and his moods were at high tide, his infectious enthusiasm would touch everything. Her mother was kind, generous, and had the role of offering counsel when life’s incidents called for it. In a nutshell, her extended family was a plethora of caring, well-liked people willing to help those in need of help. Prior to her first taste of true mental madness, her father retired from the Air Force.
The family moved from Washington to Southern California. Culture-shock hit her square in the jaw, but soon she learned to enjoy the exhilaration of intellectual conversations among the financially elite of California. She got a college-aged boyfriend, a man she met at UCLA during her volunteer work in the pharmacology department. It was a standard high-school fling that petered out once she digested her high school diploma and then met the fate of her mental illness. Within a year of moving to California, her father—who still displayed high moods and great laughter—was becoming dark.
His exuberant enthusiasm faded as he, too, faded into depression and a hermit-like existence. This was compounded with his new drinking problem. She didn’t realize, however, that her own flights of manic highs and depressing lows were an equally challenging personality to live with. At 17, she found herself riding the wave of her manic high: staying up night after night, writing poetry and making future plans that were unattainable. She felt exuberant beyond belief. She wore out her friends with her endless, rapid-fire discussions. They told her, “slow down, Kay. You’re wearing me out, Kay. ”
She did. Her halt came crashing down on her. Her initial bout with mania was light-hearted and fairly gentile in comparison to the wild out-of-control episodes to follow years later. She wrote, Then the bottom began to fall out of my life and mind. My thinking…was torturous. In the coming years, she began to lose to the pace of her own thought-processing. Ideas stormed across her. She was on overload. Her acceptance of her illness wasn’t apparent to her. It was slow and gradual. She described it with such empowerment in the following two, short sentences: I did not wake up one day find myself mad.
Life should be so simple. At this point, she obtained her doctorate in psychiatry and a position as an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry. In three months of reaching this esteemed level, she became a raging psychotic. She was, eventually, treated for manic depression and prescribed lithium, back in 1974—a drug that would save her from pure delirium, a state she couldn’t admit to, due to the ramifications of the high states of mania. She stopped taking it, against medical advisors—a common quirk among manic depressives who long for the theater of the manic highs.
She went through bouts of dark depression with a suicidal itch. At this time, she was in therapy two to three times per week, while still staffed at UCLA. She was losing her senses due to the stresses of co-workers and the feudal nature of staff meetings—according to Kay anyway. She, then met, David, a fellow psychiatrist. They built a relationship out of her openness and his immediate kind temperament and his diagnosis of one of her difficult patients. She, at the time, was still married; so she denied his repeated dinner offerings. Their closeness grew.
She finally gained the courage to tell him of her mental illness, fearing his reaction. He soothed her. She wrote, “I say, rotten luck. ” His unbridled kindness and enthusiasm formed a balance in her edgy existence. Then, he died of a heart attack at the age of 44. Kay Jamison was 32. She discovered that grief is far different from depression; for there is hope in grief. She wrote of her grieving: David had loved and accepted me in an extraordinary way…And now, four years after his death, I found a very different kind of love and a renewed belief in life.
She met an Englishman, a man who came to know her better than anyone. At this point, she came to the realization that her life depended on lithium. Yet, she chose, through therapeutic counseling with her psychiatrists in L. A. and London, as well as with the support of her Englishman partner, to lower her dosage. She continued her courageous clinical work in the very field of mental illness that has drenched her life with manic highs and dark, lifeless lows. She worked with patients and spent much of her time in the field of research: searching, with hearty commitment, to track down the gene that causes manic depression.
Yet, aside from her efforts and personal relationship with finding the gene, she, at the same times, wonders what it might mean if she were to discover the gene. There is an obvious hereditary link, but is the gene the means to a solution? That question remains to be answered and cannot be anything but speculation until research discovers the gene—if someone ever does. One question being this: is it right, if a parent were aware of a prenatal gene carrying manic-depressive gene to abort the fetus? The difficulties surrounding the ethical issues raised would be a challenging arena of debate.
This situation is further complicated when one or both parents are bi-polar. Why, then, should they have the privilege to play God and determine an unborn child’s fate. From the other side, people would question a person suffering through life with such a debilitating and emotionally destructible illness. When we consider Ms. Jamison’s illness, it’s important to point out that her manic depressive illness came prior to today’s medically softened term: bipolar disorder. Most doctors and clinicians, according to Kay Jamison, feel that the term bipolar loosens the stigma associated with manic depression.
However, now that the term bipolar is so common in our culture, the stigma may have resurfaced. Of course, it’s up to individual interpretation and should be left to the patients to decide. Yet, the bipolar mind is in a pretty tight corner because it is truly not up to the patient or clinician to determine what society chooses to entitle as stigmatic. If a person discovers your diagnosis, or witnesses the behaviors of mania first-hand and is wise enough to wade through the other possible reasons behind a person’s behavior, its still, in the end, mental illness.
And the overwhelming tendency, today, is that so many people are medicated and self-monitored that your best friend, or lover, may harness the internal wiring of manic depression, and keep the brunt of it hidden from you. Medication and therapeutic counseling has found new avenues to aid in curtailing this beastly illness. Technology and scientific research continue to make advancements for the betterment of the individual and society as a whole. Yet, the transparent selves within a diseased mind will continue to haunt people.
