Name: An Unquiet Mind
ISBN: 9780330346511

Kay Redfield Jamison

The author recounts her own personal struggle with manic-depression and how it has shaped her life.

A Memoir of Moods and Madness

An Unquiet Mind

Looking back over those years with the cool clinical perspective acquired much later, I realize that I was experiencing what is so coldly and prosaically known as a remission — common in the early years of manic-depressive illness and a deceptive respite from the savagely recurrent course that the untreated illness ultimately takes — but I assumed I was just back to my normal self.

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were. Antidepressants might be indicated for psychiatric patients, for those of weaker stock, but not for us. It was a costly attitude; our upbringing and pride held us hostage. 

My career plans also had changed. It had become clear to me over time that my mercurial temperament and physical restlessness were going to make medical school — especially the first two years, which required sitting still in lecture halls for hours at a time — an unlikely proposition. I found it difficult to stay put for long and found that I learned best on my own. I loved research and writing, and the thought of being chained to the kind of schedule that medical school required was increasingly repugnant.

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.

University administrators do not consider the pronounced seasonal changes in behaviors and abilities that are part and parcel of the lives of most manic-depressives. My undergraduate transcript, consequently, was riddled with failing grades and incompleted classes, but my research papers, fortunately, offset my often dreary grades. My mercurial moods and recurrent, very black depressions took a huge personal and academic toll during those college years.

It never occurred to me that I was ill; my brain just didn't put it in those terms. Finally, however, after hearing a lecture about depression in my abnormal psychology course, I went to the student health service with the intention of asking to see a psychiatrist. I got as far as the stairwell just outside the clinic but was only able to sit there, paralyzed with fear and shame, unable to go in and unable to leave. I must have sat there, head in my hands, sobbing, for more than an hour. Then I left and never went back. Eventually, the depression went away of its own accord, but only long enough for it to regroup and mobilize for the next attack.

Being particularly given to strong and absolute passions, I was at one point desperately convinced that we had to have a sloth as a pet. My mother, who had been pushed about as far as possible by allowing me to keep dogs, cats, birds, fish, turtles, lizards, frogs, and mice, was less than wildly enthusiastic. My father convinced me to put together a detailed scientific and literary notebook about sloths. He suggested that, in addition to providing practical information about their dietary needs, living space, and veterinary requirements, I also write a series of poems about sloths and essays about what they meant to me, design a habitat for them that would work within our current house, and make detailed observations of their behavior at the zoo; if I did all this, he said, my parents would then consider finding a sloth for me.

Mother, who has an absolute belief that it is not the cards that one is dealt in life, it is how one plays them, is, by far, the highest card I was dealt.

The long and important years of childhood and early adolescence were, for the most part, very happy ones for me, and they afforded me a solid base of warmth, friendship, and confidence. They were to be an extremely powerful amulet, a potent and positive countervailing force against future unhappiness. My sister had no such years, no such amulets. Not surprisingly, perhaps, when both she and I had to deal with our respective demons, my sister saw the darkness as being within and part of herself, the family, and the world. I, instead, saw it as a stranger; however lodged within my mind and soul the darkness became, it almost always seemed an outside force that was at war with my natural self.

Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me's is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: "How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?"

I realized that I was on the receiving end of a very thorough psychiatric history and examination; the questions were familiar, I had asked them of others a hundred times, but I found it unnerving to have to answer them, unnerving not to know where it all was going, and unnerving to realize how confusing it was to be a patient.

I really believed all of the things I had been taught about weathering it through, self-reliance, and not imposing your problems on other people. But looking back over the wreckage brought about by this kind of blind stupidity and pride, I now wonder, What on earth could I have been thinking? I also had been taught to think for myself: Why, then, didn't I question these rigid, irrelevant notions of self-reliance? Why didn't I see how absurd my defiance really was?

I wished more than anything that he could see that I was well, and that I somehow could repay him for his kindness and his belief in me. But mostly, as I was sitting there in the graveyard, I thought of all of the things that David had missed by dying young. And then, after an hour or more of being lost in my thoughts, I was caught up short by the realization that I had been thinking, for the first time, about how much David had missed, rather than what we together would miss. 

I was late to understand that chaos and intensity are no substitute for lasting love, nor are they necessarily an improvement on real life. Normal people are not always boring. On the contrary. Volatility and passion, although often more romantic and enticing, are not intrinsically preferable to a steadiness of experience and feeling about another person (nor are they incompatible). These are beliefs, of course, that one has intuitively about friendships and family; they become less obvious when caught up in a romantic life that mirrors, magnifies, and perpetuates one's own mercurial emotional life and temperament.

Love, like life, is much stranger and far more complicated than one is brought up to believe. Our common intellectual interests — medicine, science, and psychiatry — are very strong ones, and our differences in both substance and style have allowed each of us a great deal of independence, which has been essential and which, ultimately, has bound us very close to one another over the years. My life with Richard has become a safe harbor: an extremely interesting place, filled with love and warmth and always a bit open to the outer sea. But like all safe harbors that manage to retain fascination as well as safety, it was less than smooth sailing to reach.

And, ultimately, it is probably unreasonable to expect the kind of acceptance of it that one so desperately desires. It is not an illness that lends itself to easy empathy. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than as being willful, angry, irrational, or simply tiresome. What I experience as beyond my control can instead seem to him deliberate and frightening. It is, at these times, impossible for me to convey my desperation and pain; it is harder still, afterward, to recover from the damaging acts and dreadful words. These terrible black manias, with their agitated, ferocious, and savage sides, are understandably difficult for Richard to understand and almost as difficult for me to explain.

There is, for me, a mixture of longings for an earlier age; this is inevitable, perhaps, in any life, but there is an extra twist of almost painful nostalgia brought about by having lived a life particularly intense in moods. This makes it even harder to leave the past behind, and life, on occasion, becomes a kind of elegy for lost moods.

LIMEKI 

De vez en cuando, mi mente se vuelve todavía un carnaval de luces, de risas, de sonidos y de posibilidades. La alegría y la exuberancia y la facilidad me colman y se derraman en los demás. Esos fúlgidos y gloriosos momentos duran poco y pronto desaparecen. Mis afectos y mis esperanzas, habiéndose elevado brevemente hasta lo más alto de la noria, se desploman con la misma rapidez en un cansado y negro montón. El tiempo pasa, los afectos pasan, y yo termino por ser la de siempre. Pero, de nuevo, quién sabe cuándo, el carnaval embriagador regresará a mi mente.

Kay R. Jamison

The personal memoir of a manic depressive and an authority on the subject describes the onset of the illness during her teenage years and her determined journey through the realm of available treatments. Reprint. 125,000 first printing.

Reading someone who describes this pure and visceral the affection you've suffered for so many years... Something I can't explain. It was hard for her to write this book, but I really appreciate it. It's almost a portrait of how I feel. And I agree with her: The meds and the therapy is a great help, but you can't achieve a "normal" life without love, and I'm really grateful of my partner for being by my side in all my rollercoasters.

"People go mad in idiosyncratic ways. "

"The ominous, dark, and deathful quality that I felt as a young child watching the high clear skies fill with smoke and flames is always there, somehow laced into the beauty and vitality of life. That darkness is an integral part of who I am, and it takes no effort of imagination on my part to remember the months of relentless blackness and exhaustion."

Got the recommendation from Storygraph that related to my other memoir books and I finally reached this state. It only has about two hundreds pages and the story is quite enchanting for me. Shall I say it is a classic, too? Well, yes, but you would still see great new medications we might find in this early day as well. 

I have been struggling for some mental illness, haven't gotten my diagnose but I keep reading this kind of book to make me... feel a bit helped? Or simply new friends on the same boat for me to cope. It has many medical contents and a bit unfamiliar words for me personally, but Dr. Jamison wrapped it in a overflowing way. I only needed about two days to finish it (by reading it shortly and put some highlights on my notes). I learned about lithium, a chemical element of atomic number 3, a soft-silver white metal, known as lithium salts. These are used as psychiatric medications, primarily for bipolar and major depression disorders. The side effects: increasing urination or shakiness of the hands, or worse, hypothroidism. She put some guidelines too that I keep in mind: (1) try not to think about all the wild nights you once had, probably best not to have had those night anyway; (2) always keep in perspective how much better you are. Everyone else certainly points it out often enough, and, annoyingly enough. It's probably true; (3) Expect to hear two basic themes from your family, friends, and healers: "But you were doing so much better, I told you this would happen."; (4) Restock your medicine. Aha.

An Unquiet Mind is a book that you need for a merely guide-notes, starting battleground, secure way of heal over your struggle. I don't say bluntly about her manic-depression illness from this book but I want to say that, she really have been through so much despite many circumstances and things she dealt with throughout her life. For example, do you think those who have been dealing with that are able to have child? To be in the pregnancy and raise their children accordingly? The memory took the black line of the mind's underground system; thoughts would go from one tormented moment of the past to the next. If you are curious more how those mind work in your head, this book might help you. 

"After reach seeming death within my mind of heart, love has returned hope and restore life. It has made the inherent sadness of life bearable and its beauty manifest. It has, inexplicably, provided not only cloak but lantern for the darker seasons and grimmer weather." 
4.0 of 5

Belle

I learned a lot. It also creeped me out a bit because this can be a really scary illness. But it helped me understand also that it's treatable, and what it looks like when it's managed well.

An Unquiet Mind A Memoir of Moods and Madness