12. An Unquiet Mind

Book: An Unquiet Mind

Author: Kay Redfield Jamison

Number of pages: 224

What I’m watching: TV: Bones, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Red Dwarf

What I’m playing: Pokémon Red

 

 

 

 

            After Geekspeak and The American West on Film, I wanted something more narrative. I wanted to read a story, not essays. Luckily, I rolled a three!

An Unquiet Mind isn’t a fictional story; it’s a memoir by a psychologist who has manic-depressive illness, what is now called bipolar disorder. Dr. Jamison actually prefers the term manic-depressive illness and discusses why in the book. This book came out in the 90s, and I remember, even as a kid, being aware of how huge this book became – it was a national bestseller. However, I didn’t know what it was about until much later. Recently, one of my psychology professors at CSU strongly recommended it. So I thought, yeah, I might look into it. Before reading, I noticed on the back cover a blurb by another famous psychologist/writer, Oliver Sacks – an author whose work may soon be making an appearance on this blog. I took that as a good sign.

            Dr. Jamison first explains in a prologue that she started studying mood disorders because of her own personal experience with manic-depressive illness. I understand; my own decision to pursue a psychology degree was based, in part, on my own experience with depression. After the prologue, she opens with an incredible story of a childhood experience one day on the playground. She grew up near an Air Force base, being a pilot’s daughter. One day, a plane almost crashed into her school. It missed the school because the pilot sacrificed himself to maneuver the plane away from the school rather than eject and risk the plane hitting the school. Holy shit, what an opening!

            I love Dr. Jamison’s writing style. Her words seem to me natural, conversational, brilliant, intellectual, clever, and really funny. I did not expect a book about manic-depression to be as funny as it is. On a childhood trip to the zoo, Jamison writes “If there is anything more boring that watching a sloth – other than watching cricket, perhaps, or the House Appropriations Committee meetings on C-SPAN – I have yet to come across it” (20). Jamison writes about her life growing up in a military environment, her family, and her first time dealing with manic-depression, which was in high school. I’m not doing justice to her richly detailed, eventful life, but I will say that it did not take long into reading An Unquiet Mind to be hooked by Jamison’s compelling memoir.

            Next are Kay Jamison’s college years. Sometimes, she goes into details about her illness. She talks about her unrestrained buying sprees during her manias. What sucks on top of that is “unfortunately, the pink overdraft notices from the bank always seemed to arrive when I was in the throes of the depressions that inevitably followed my weeks of exaltation” (43). During college, Jamison spent a year studying abroad in Scotland. There, she studied marine biology, a class which she found challenging but rewarding:

There were, however, definite advantages to studying invertebrate zoology. For starters, unlike in psychology, you could eat your subjects. The lobsters – fresh from the sea and delicious – were especially popular. We cooked them in beakers over Bunsen burners until one of our lecturers, remarking that “It has not gone unnoticed that some of your subjects seem to be letting themselves out of their tanks at night,” put a halt to our attempts to supplement college meals. (50-51)

I won’t reference every anecdote or quote from the book that I enjoyed, because that would simply be too much. I was fascinated throughout. However, it wasn’t all funny. She brings up a lot of the difficulties of both having manic-depressive illness and the negative side effects of the lithium treatment. For instance, the lithium affected Dr. Jamison’s vision and concentration, resulting in the inability to read books (much later she decides to decrease her lithium dosage and regains her ability to read).

            Her position as a successful psychologist allows for some pretty remarkable perspectives. First of all, she is surrounded by other intelligent psychologists who both help her and provide their own opinions, including her therapist. And as a psychologist, Dr. Jamison has the added lens of seeing patients who also suffer from mental illness. She is herself both a patient and psychotherapist. She’s professionally treated others with manic-depression and seen the deadly result of going off lithium, but personally fought with the decision to continue her own treatment.

            I mentioned in my last post that I spent a week in Canada. While there, my fiancé and I had a little lunch date/picnic along the river. We decided I would read aloud from An Unquiet Mind.

I gave her a brief recap of what I’d been reading and just picked up from where I left off. Dr. Jamison had just met David, a charming Englishmen who visited UCLA. They fell in love and she spent time with him in London and Washington. It was romantic and suited our date. However, David passed away from a heart attack. I read to Olivia David’s funeral and Jamison’s grief. At the end of that section, I had to pause and put the book down because we were crying. Very few books have ever brought me to tears. An Unquiet Mind created, for me, the rare mix of laughter and tears from a book.

            I’m glad to say that Dr. Jamison finds love again and marries Richard Wyatt. Within her book, she reflects how An Unquiet Mind primarily became about love and personal relationships, rather than solely about manic-depressive illness. I find that accurate. This book was largely about her family, friends, colleagues, and romantic relationships. And I’d say that’s a good thing. It is deeply personal, which makes the book so much more compelling and real.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying. This book was so much better than I expected, and I strongly recommend it to anyone, not just psychology nerds like me.

 

Works Cited

Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print.