an unquiet mind a memoir of moods and madness

One of Kay’s concerned friends and colleagues at UCLA had begun to understand what Kay was going through, too, and he suggested she see a psychiatrist and start on lithium, a powerful mood stabilizer. As Kay’s marriage suffered and her manic overspending brought financial troubles, her brother provided help and financial support. Kay experienced mania as a time of increased productivity, radical confidence, intense sexual desire, heightened joy, and the “cosmic” sense that everything in her life made sense-but the depressions that followed were mentally and physically debilitating. In Part Two, Kay describes her gradual descent into madness over the course of her first couple of years as an assistant professor of clinical psychology at UCLA. Even as she treated patients whose symptoms mirrored her own and studied disorders of the mind and moods, she remained in denial about what her symptoms indicated.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree and marrying a sensitive and handsome French artist, Kay decided to continue her studies by enrolling in UCLA’s doctoral program in psychology. Still, she managed to keep appearances up and even began working as a research assistant in one of her psychology professor’s laboratories. Her moods continued cycling, frightening her and distracting her from her studies. At eighteen, after her first true manic episode, Kay enrolled in the University of California Los Angeles and began studying psychology. There, Kay began experiencing cycles of mania and depression, while her father, too, grew prone to violent rages, “black” depressions, and alcoholism.

When Kay was fifteen, her father retired from the Air Force and moved the family to California. As a teenager, Kay’s moods became more mercurial and difficult to manage-but after a frightening visit to a nearby psychiatric institution, Kay grew too afraid to admit to herself or anybody else what she was experiencing. Her father, a charismatic and gregarious Air Force pilot and meteorologist, and her mother, a buttoned-up homemaker, were supportive of the young Kay’s early interest in medicine as she volunteered as a candy striper at a local hospital. Jamison begins part one of her memoir by describing her childhood near an Air Force base in Washington D.C. The memoir narrates her journey toward a better understanding of her own mind through the realms of love, academia, and introspection. In An Unquiet Mind, lauded researcher and professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Kay Redfield Jamison tells the story of her lifelong struggle with manic-depressive illness.

An unquiet mind a memoir of moods and madness