Kay Redfield Jamison
Author of An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
About the Author
Clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison was born on June 22, 1946. She received a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She is considered one of the foremost experts on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood. She is Professor of Psychiatry show more at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of numerous books including An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness; Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide; and Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Richard Wyatt
Works by Kay Redfield Jamison
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993) 1,370 copies, 9 reviews
Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character (2017) 159 copies, 2 reviews
Associated Works
This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women (2006) — Contributor — 1,142 copies, 36 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Redfield Jamison, Kay
- Birthdate
- 1946-06-22
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of California, Los Angeles
- Occupations
- clinical psychologist
professor
autobiographer
producer
screenwriter - Organizations
- University of California, Los Angeles
Johns Hopkins University
National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research - Awards and honors
- MacArthur Fellowship (2001)
- Short biography
- In addition to her academic works, Prof. Jamison chronicled her own struggle with bipolar disorder (severe mania and depression) in her 1995 memoir An Unquiet Mind.
Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the co-author of the definitive medical text Manic-Depressive Illness. Dr. Jamison is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. She is also the executive producer and writer for a series of award-winning public television specials about manic-depressive illness and the arts. [from Touched with Fire (1993)] - Nationality
- USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Kay Redfield Jamison is a well-known psychotherapist at Johns Hopkins who herself famously suffers from bipolar disorder. In 1996, she wrote eloquently about her journey in An Unquiet Mind. In this book, she posits the idea that to be most effective, healers – the doctors, counselors, and leaders – need to be healed themselves. To support her argument, she provides life narratives of many such eminent people, with a focus on the early-to-mid twentieth century.
Jamison uses historical show more stories to illustrate that many of the best healers are sufferers, too. She explores the phenomenon known as “shell shock” in World War I. At the time, soldiers experiencing this were sent away from the front to heal. Strangely, those who are healed were immediately sent back to the front to fight and often die. At the time, physicians and nurses saw this inherent contradiction in their work. Their task from the military enabled more dreary death.
Many of these discursions serve as meditations, almost like short homilies in a memorial service. They are not overtly directional but instead meander, much like a psychotherapeutic encounter. The psychiatrist WHR Rivers plays a leading role in this discourse, and other well-known topics include Paul Robeson, Notre Dame Cathedral, Siegfried Sassoon, ancient Greek medicine, and William Osler. In the epilogue, Jamison says that she started out to write a book about healing, but she ended up writing a book about healers.
This work will disappoint readers who like a structured, orderly writing style that engages contemporary debates. It’s well-researched and interesting, but it’s neither controversial nor trending. It’s more about circumspectly peering into others’ private lives to find how they find healing. Her thesis that those healed make the best healers is echoed throughout the centuries, but is strangely forgotten in modern medical training, with all its focus on objectivity and evidence. In practice, healing remains as much of an art as a science, particularly in fields like psychiatry and psychotherapy. Jamison, a provider and receiver of life-healing aid, reminds us of this thematic strand in history. I think her contribution here contains an idea that deserves to be heard and reflected upon. show less
Jamison uses historical show more stories to illustrate that many of the best healers are sufferers, too. She explores the phenomenon known as “shell shock” in World War I. At the time, soldiers experiencing this were sent away from the front to heal. Strangely, those who are healed were immediately sent back to the front to fight and often die. At the time, physicians and nurses saw this inherent contradiction in their work. Their task from the military enabled more dreary death.
Many of these discursions serve as meditations, almost like short homilies in a memorial service. They are not overtly directional but instead meander, much like a psychotherapeutic encounter. The psychiatrist WHR Rivers plays a leading role in this discourse, and other well-known topics include Paul Robeson, Notre Dame Cathedral, Siegfried Sassoon, ancient Greek medicine, and William Osler. In the epilogue, Jamison says that she started out to write a book about healing, but she ended up writing a book about healers.
This work will disappoint readers who like a structured, orderly writing style that engages contemporary debates. It’s well-researched and interesting, but it’s neither controversial nor trending. It’s more about circumspectly peering into others’ private lives to find how they find healing. Her thesis that those healed make the best healers is echoed throughout the centuries, but is strangely forgotten in modern medical training, with all its focus on objectivity and evidence. In practice, healing remains as much of an art as a science, particularly in fields like psychiatry and psychotherapy. Jamison, a provider and receiver of life-healing aid, reminds us of this thematic strand in history. I think her contribution here contains an idea that deserves to be heard and reflected upon. show less
Years ago my mother took me to a series of talks at The U of Penn -- about depression and connected maladies. I heard Bill Styron talk about his terrifying bout with depression (about which he wrote in Darkness Visible) and also Kay Redfield Jamison whose book, An Unquiet Mind had just recently come out. Previous to this, Jamison, a clinical psychologist, had kept her own bipolar illness to herself and where necessary, friends and colleagues. (She prefers the term manic-depressive as more show more accurately descriptive.) The thumbnail takeaways are 1) If you are bipolar and lithium works for you, TAKE IT faithfully. 2) ALSO don't neglect to have a good therapist and psychiatrist who know your story 3) forgive yourself for the bad times and move on. 4) be open to loving and being loved. Jamison explores one of the key bipolar dilemmas--a terrifying number of those who have been diagnosed, who have had horrendous and repeated episodes of mania and depression, refuse to take lithium or quit, again and again once they feel better. The reasons are mainly cultural and she explores those. She also describes the allure and the terror of mania and the combined terror and utter tedium of depression, the former (the allure part) of which also made taking lithium regularly difficult to bear. We all know people who are bipolar, as it is surprisingly common, still kept hidden by individuals and families more afraid of the disruption of others knowing than of the private suffering, and so very very much the hidden cause behind many suicides and destroyed relationships. Jamison has devoted herself to bringing this topic into the open and to taking the cultural onus from being a sufferer down a few pegs. With time and experience too, she has been able to reduce her dose of lithium to one where her mind works more quickly, although she has had to work at staying on an even keel. (This took decades and dedication.)
Brava! ***** show less
Brava! ***** show less
Dr Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the world’s greatest authorities on mood disorders, particularly bipolar disorder, which was previously called manic-depressive illness or manic depression, and she is a tenured professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, after holding a similar position at UCLA, and an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews. She is a highly gifted writer who has published several superb books; I can show more recommend "Exuberance: The Passion for Life", "Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir", and "Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament." As if this wasn’t enough, there are two other things that make Dr Jamison even more remarkable: she is a clinical psychologist, not a psychiatrist, which is unusual in a medical school department, especially one with the reputation of Johns Hopkins, and she has suffered with bipolar disorder since she was a teenager.
In "An Unquiet Mind," Dr Jamison describes her own difficulties as a sufferer of severe bipolar I (manic depressive) disorder and how she fought taking lithium for years before finally accepting that this highly effective medicine would provide her with the inner peace that she was long searching for, and how she somehow managed to be a highly effective clinician, and one who brought her own knowledge of the disorder to the table and allowed the trainees who worked under her to provide the best care for the patients who were treated at Hopkins, while conducting research and writing prolifically.
In addition to being a highly interesting story "An Unquiet Mind" is a page turner that I found nearly impossible to put down. I read it for the first time shortly after it was published in 1995, during my last year or two of medical school, and I knew that I would reread it again someday. I had no idea that I would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder this year, so it was an easy decision to borrow it from my local library system. It was just as good the second time around, and I’m certain that I’ll be reading more of Dr Jamison’s books in the coming months. show less
In "An Unquiet Mind," Dr Jamison describes her own difficulties as a sufferer of severe bipolar I (manic depressive) disorder and how she fought taking lithium for years before finally accepting that this highly effective medicine would provide her with the inner peace that she was long searching for, and how she somehow managed to be a highly effective clinician, and one who brought her own knowledge of the disorder to the table and allowed the trainees who worked under her to provide the best care for the patients who were treated at Hopkins, while conducting research and writing prolifically.
In addition to being a highly interesting story "An Unquiet Mind" is a page turner that I found nearly impossible to put down. I read it for the first time shortly after it was published in 1995, during my last year or two of medical school, and I knew that I would reread it again someday. I had no idea that I would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder this year, so it was an easy decision to borrow it from my local library system. It was just as good the second time around, and I’m certain that I’ll be reading more of Dr Jamison’s books in the coming months. show less
The subtitle of this memoir by Dr. Kay Jamison calls it ‘a memoir of moods and madness’ but it’s far more than that; her manic-depressive illness is just a part of what she shares about her life experiences as a whole. Of the dozens of passages I underlined I think this one expresses the tone of this memoir the best,
“When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written show more it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well; love as sustainer, as a renewer, and as protector.”
Overall, this is a deeply personal story that’s worth reading if for no other reason than as a life and love affirming message. show less
“When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written show more it, however, it has somehow turned out to be very much a book about love as well; love as sustainer, as a renewer, and as protector.”
Overall, this is a deeply personal story that’s worth reading if for no other reason than as a life and love affirming message. show less
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