An Unquiet Mind
A clinical psychologist writing about her own manic depressive illness, from both sides of the desk at once.
Jamison, a professor of psychiatry, sets down the course of her own manic-depressive illness beside the clinical knowledge she teaches. The account moves between the racing, expansive states of mania and the flat, immovable weight of depression, reporting each from the inside while she continues to diagnose and treat the same condition in her patients.
Much of the book turns on her long resistance to lithium: the dullness of a levelled mood, the loss she describes in giving up the fevered clarity of her highs, and the repeated stopping and restarting of medication before she accepts it. She is candid about the denial that travels with the illness, and about a period of severe depression that brings her close to suicide, which she sets down with reflective distance rather than method.
For a clinician, the worth of the book lies in hearing why an informed, capable patient resists the treatment that keeps her well, and how the seductions of high mood can outweigh the case for staying with it.
About the author
Kay Redfield Jamison
Kay Redfield Jamison, born in 1946, is an American clinical psychologist and the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders and Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is a leading authority on mood disorders, particularly manic-depressive illness, which she both studies and has lived with. She is the author of An Unquiet Mind, a memoir of her own experience with the illness, and of Touched with Fire, which examines links between mood disorders and artistic temperament.
Details
- 1995
- Vintage
- Vintage
- 240
- 9780679763307