Making Piece With an Unquiet Mind
Anyone who wants a role model for wrestling with bipolar disorder must read the autobiography "An Unquiet Mind" by Kay Redfield Jamison.
The book reveals her harrowing challenges and thoughts as she grappled with bipolar disorder, rising to distinguish herself academically at the highest levels. Her journey is detailed in her astounding and revelatory tome published in 1995. She was first diagnosed with the illness in 1975, the same year that she received a PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA.
Jamison is currently the Dalio Professor of Mood Disorders and Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
She is achingly eloquent in detailing her personal path through bipolar disorder, while interspersing poignant literary quotations that illuminate her disclosures. It is grounded in courage and written as a cogent call to accept bipolar disorder as an adversary that can be managed.
Jamison reveals that she barely had the will to tell her prospective employer, the chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Hopkins, that she was bipolar and taking lithium, but she decided that she had no ethical choice but to take the leap. They had an interview over lunch at which she disclosed her illness to him. She recalled her trepidation that not only did she have bipolar but she was seeking a medical professorship when she was not an MD. As she was holding her breath, Jamison describes the response to her disclosure:
"Kay dear," the [the chairman] said, "I know you have [bipolar illness]." He paused and then laughed. "If we got rid of all the [bipolar members] on the medical staff school faculty, not only would we have a much smaller faculty, it would be a far more boring one."
So began her distinguished career at Hopkins which continues to this day. The memoir itself was her ultimate coming out to the public at large.
Lithium had been her breakthrough drug. When she was younger, she had tried to stop taking it, but it did not end well. She attempted suicide, but was saved by a phone call from her brother. After this incident, she decided that she would not run the risk of going off lithium again, even though she felt that it frequently emotionally "blunted" her.
Redfield reveals that not all her coming outs were equally successful. In Malibu, while still in California, she told a former colleague, a psychoanalyst, of her condition:
He was, he said, "deeply disappointed." He had thought I was so wonderful, so strong: How could I have attempted suicide? What I had been thinking? I was such an act of cowardice, so selfish.
I realized to my horror, that he was serious. I was absolutely transfixed. His pain at hearing that I had [bipolar] was, it would seem, far worse than mine at actually having it. For a few minutes, I felt like Typhoid Mary.
Jamison is disarmingly frank in speaking of the often eviscerating pain of being severely bipolar. However, through perseverance and sheer grit, she has carved out a stellar career in academia, research, writing, teaching and assisting individuals with mood disorders. She recounts that despite her often desperate struggles, she has lived a full life including loving marriages and loving relationships.
However, she still sometimes is wistful about the exhilaration she felt in many of her manic states, the sheer elation of the spirit and soul:
I look back over my shoulder and feel an intense young girl, and then a volatile and disturbed young woman both with high dreams and restless aspirations: how could one, should one, recapture that intensity or re-experience the glorious moods of dancing all night and into the morning, the gliding through starfields and dancing along the rings of Saturn, the zany manic enthusiasms?
It is not uncommon for people with bipolar disorder who have experienced mania to -- while taking medications such as lithium -- miss the euphoric highs of unrestrained exultation. Jamison, in the end (as noted above), chooses to settle for the "flattened out" moods that come with taking lithium, but still occasionally regrets not experiencing her soaring highs.
Jamison also affirms that love has sustained her after her most dreadful bouts of major depression:
After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to recreate hope and restore life. It has at its best, made the inherent sadness of life bearable, and its beauty manifest.
She also gives a nod to how bipolar illness has allowed her to explore more of the "limitless corners, with their limitless views of life." Indeed, she offers an extraordinarily insightful and nuanced view on living with bipolar disorder and the personal decisions it demands us to make.
In the end she regards bipolar disorder as "a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys. 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,' wrote Dylan Thomas, 'drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees.'"
An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison, Vintage Books.
Mark Karlin is retired, after a long career in advocating against gun violence, as a hospital executive and founder of a progressive website. He graduated from Yale University with an honors degree in English.