Life, Lunacy and Lithium: Book Review of an Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Life, Lunacy and Lithium   1

Life, Lunacy and Lithium

Book Review of

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Genise Caruso

March 25, 2009

Life, Lunacy and Lithium   2

Summary

Reading An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison, was much like driving by the scene of a horrible car wreck. We snuck a peek, turned a page, faced disturbing images and soon became entwined with gut wrenching emotions that made us want to run away. As if transfixed by a cavalcade of emergency vehicles’ flashing lights, our morbid fascination compelled us to look on and face our fears!  

Author Kay Jamison takes you on an emotional roller coaster, as she shares her journey between the depths of despair and darkness of shear madness, into enlightenment and the road to recovery. An Unquiet Mind poignantly chronicles her life; a personal hell of living with manic-depressive illness and the crusade she waged against lithium, the medication ultimately responsible for restoring her mental health.

An Unquiet Mind is an autobiographical depiction into the world of mental illness, as seen through the eyes of author, Kay Jamison, from two perspectives – doctor and patient. After completing her undergraduate and graduate studies at UCLA in psychology, she became a prominent authority on mood disorders and Professor of Psychiatry at John Hopkins University School of Medicine, all while trying to hide a shocking secret that could have virtually ended her career, dead in its tracks. Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison suffered from the very illness she treated others for – manic-depression, otherwise known as bipolar disorder.

Jamison’s decision to write this book and candidly discuss her illness was fraught with uncertainty and much trepidation. The consequences of publically baring her soul, recounting details of violent psychotic episodes, suicidal depression and tumultuous attacks of mania could have been more than she bargained for, both personally and professionally. Yet, she was more worn out by the pretense, tired of hiding and being silent. “One is what one is, and the dishonesty of hiding behind a degree, or a title, or any manner and collection of words, is still

Life, Lunacy and Lithium   3

exactly that: dishonest.” (pg. 7) However, the reluctance to disclose her illness was something that remained consistent throughout her life and caused by a mind-set deep-rooted by family

influences. Jamison’s father, a career Air Force officer, was also subject to extreme mood swings long before she ever knew about manic-depression. Her mother, “kind, fair, and generous,” (pg. 17) became the rock that kept her alive throughout the madness. However, growing up with military influences, “expectations were clear and excuses were few,” (pg. 28) and personal issues kept private. She was taught that “anger and discontent, lest they kill, were to be kept to oneself,” (pg. 29) and “a general belief that personal matters should be kept personal.” (pg. 201)

Jamison’s intense moods were characteristically a part of her emotional fiber all throughout her life. She thinks back to early childhood memories of being overly sensitive and highly excitable, then becoming more unpredictable and supercharged as the years passed. The first, of many, unimaginable confrontations with the demons of manic-depressive illness, dragged Jamison into Hell, when she was a senior in high school. She recalled, “…once the siege began, I lost my mind rather rapidly.” (pg.36) At first, she was incredibly enthusiastic and intensely focused, reading, writing and planning, with the exhausting vitality and exhilarating gusto, so typically present in the mania stages of the illness. However, once the bottom fell, it fell hard and fast. Thinking became grueling; reading was futile. Utter exhaustion and a grim preoccupation with death plagued her mind. She was empty, “with a dead heart and brain as cold as clay.” (pg. 38)

Despite everything, Jamison still highly intelligent and ambitious enrolled at UCLA, wanting to pursue a career in medicine. College, for her, was like a tug-of-war; a battle between overwhelming periods of hopeless depression or exuberant highs of energy, extremes and excessiveness in all forms. After taking a well-needed year off to study in Scotland, it became

Life, Lunacy and Lithium   4

clear to Jamison that her temperament wasn’t going to be conducive to the strict regiment of medical school and changed her career path to the field of psychology, instead.

While married to a French artist, Jamison focused her doctoral studies on clinical psychology, yet in spite of the extensive clinical training, never connected her own problems with the manic-depressive illness described in her textbooks. Within three months of becoming an assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Jamison, was “ravingly psychotic.” (pg. 63)

Her early career was mixed with periods of enhanced energy and clarity that fostered creativity and stimulated her work with patients. Yet, she experienced overwhelming suicidal depression, deviant ways of thinking and erratic shopping expeditions, buying things she neither needed nor ever could afford.

The most riveting part of An Unquiet Mind is where Jamison graphically depicted going completely insane. After experiencing a horrible hallucination she called a close colleague who in addition to prescribing lithium, insisted she take off time from work and provided unconditional encouragement and the support she needed during this critical time.  Jamison recalled,

There was a definite point where I knew I was insane. Fragments of ideas, images, sentences, raced around and around in my mind . . . Nothing once familiar to me was familiar. I wanted desperately to slow down but could not…. I would feel my mind encased by black lines of light that were terrifying to me. My delusions centered on the slow painful deaths of all the green plants in the world. . . . Increasingly, all of my images were black and decaying. (pg. 82)

...