PDF Summary:An Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison

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Many people living with manic depression don’t seek treatment because of fear of professional backlash, stigma, and misguided treatment from doctors. Because of these deterrents, Jamison decided to open up about her illness. She wants to expose the beauty of the ugly beast she has inside, a beast that almost killed her and succeeds in killing thousands of others. She is tired of hiding and feeling ashamed. This book is her attempt to bring awareness to the disease and remove the shame for everyone afflicted with mental health disorders.

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Her mother brought a sturdiness to the household. She’d grown up popular, happy, and innocent of the pain life held. She believed in playing the cards you were dealt and maintaining a level of predictability in your life. Jamison’s maternal grandparents were of the same convictions and temperament and left their daughter with a great ability to behave honorably and follow through in any situation.

Jamison believes these steady and steadfast qualities helped her mother make it through the chaos that would become their lives in later years. Her mother’s ability to remain calm, loving, open, and committed is what kept Jamison alive so many times after she started down her dark road to madness.

A Dream in the Making

Jamison had many interests as a young girl. She wrote poetry and plays, but she also was fascinated by science and medicine. She approached her interests with unwavering passion, emulating her father’s enthusiasm for whatever was in front of her. Her parents never limited her passions, but they understood her infatuations to be merely that at times—a keen obsession with whatever was strange at the moment.

For instance, when Jamison wanted to add a...

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Jamison obsessed over death. Living seemed unnecessary, even unreasonable, when everything alive eventually died anyway. She wandered cemeteries and wrote bleak poems about her decaying mind and body. She started adding vodka to her morning juice and became infatuated with the thought of suicide. Yet somehow she was able to hide this internal turmoil from the outside world. Only a handful of people ever noticed a disturbing change in her behavior, and she always assured them she was fine.

Inside, she was aware that something was terrifyingly wrong with her, but the idea of a mental illness never occurred to her. All she knew was that the darkness was tearing seams into the fabric of her mind and soul. She felt herself slipping away and death around each corner, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

Higher Education

Jamison’s college life started with disappointment and continued to descend from there. Her dream was to attend the University of Chicago, where both her father and maternal grandfather had received their graduate degrees. The school was also known as a haven for free-thinkers and had the bonus of being away from her family and California. But...

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Jamison liked teaching and took to her new position with ease. She was free to study and research whatever she wanted, and she threw herself into this freedom. She wasn’t sleeping much, but she didn’t think anything of it beyond a commitment to her work. She doubts it would have made any difference if she’d realized that sleeplessness was a sign of mania.

Every summer, the university chancellor threw a party for new faculty in his garden. Jamison attended, as did the man who would become her psychiatrist much later. In her memory, the party was a success. She was enthusiastic and friendly. She fluttered like a social butterfly between this person and that and drank and ate heartily. She kept people engaged in extensive conversations, assuming she was exuding optimal charm. She remembers having a marvelous time.

But as she would discover, her memories were not often accurate. After she met the man who became her psychiatrist, she learned what the objective opinion of her behavior at the party was. He said she was provocatively dressed and had a thick layer of make-up on. **She was frenzied and babbling in her discussions with others. His immediate assessment of her that day...

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Another part of her grief stemmed from the high dose of lithium she took. Before the data-driven, time-released lithium prescribed today was invented, doctors in the ’70s often gave manic-depressive patients incredibly high doses of the drug. These levels often lead to toxicity, which manifested in several unfortunate ways.

High doses of lithium lead to frequent nausea and vomiting, and Jamison suffered from both. She often slept in the bathroom at night or was severely ill in public. Sometimes, the lithium made her lose motor functions, and she would tremble, lose coordination, and slur her speech. These side effects carried the additional disadvantage of mimicking inebriation or drug use. In fact, Jamison was once pulled over by the police and failed a roadside sobriety test. They only let her go after she provided the name of her psychiatrist and the prescription bottles as evidence of what was wrong with her.

However, by far the worst loss was her reduced mental acuity. The lithium made it hard for her to concentrate or read. Her vision sometimes blurred to the point of obscuring the text. When she could see, she couldn’t comprehend what she was reading or remember...

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A Deep Romance

Jamison wasn’t sure going to London so soon after her suicide was a good idea, but something told her that time with David was exactly what she needed. She packed her bags and left Los Angeles to visit David for a few weeks.

Their time together was everything she’d hoped for. They took long walks at dusk, had picnics on the weekends, and shared immense moments of passion at night. The darkness of the last year and a half started to fade, and she found she was able to enjoy life again. She also remembered how important love was.

Jamison didn’t tell David about her illness right away. In fact, she only became motivated to tell him after losing her lithium pills one day. Fearing a quick relapse into mania, she knew she had to get another prescription quickly. The best solution was for David to write one for her.

After she told him, David stayed quiet for a long time. Jamison knew he understood the implications of her disease and feared that he wouldn’t be able to accept a life with someone so volatile. She also knew that her illness was hereditary, which made her a poor candidate for motherhood. She prepared for the worst.

When David finally spoke,...

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Jamison considers the new trend of diagnosing patients with bipolar disorder, rather than manic-depressive disorder, as an illogical attempt to address stigma and discrimination through language. As a clinical and academic professional, she sees the benefit of standard diagnostic criteria with standardized language. But as a person living with the illness, she finds bipolar to be too reductive. The reference to polar opposite behaviors misses the intense nature of both mania and depression and the intersectionality that often occurs between them. In addition, Jamison wonders whether mania isn’t merely a more volatile expression of depression.

Changes in how society views mental illness are happening, albeit slowly. Most of these changes have come about by way of advocacy, representation in federal legislation, and the visibility of recovered individuals. In fact, several mental health advocacy groups have decreased stigma through community-education campaigns, increased treatment by confronting biased doctors, and improved legal rights for those with mental illness by lobbying politicians to enact protective legislation.

Although language seems like a small part of the...