An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

My manias, at least in their early and mild forms, were absolutely intoxicating states that gave rise to great personal

pleasure, an incomparable flow of thoughts, and a ceaseless energy that allowed the translation of new ideas into papers and projects.

Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet

brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide.

but one of the advantages of having had manic-depressive illness for more than thirty years is that very little seems insurmountably difficult.

who from the earliest times was almost painfully aware of everything around her.

and passing moods, and little tolerance for the conservative military lifestyle that she felt imprisoned us

all. She led her own life, defiant, and broke out with ab...

wherever she could. She hated high school and, when we were living in Washington, frequently skipped classes to go to the Smithsonian or the Army Medical Museum or j...

She was not an easy or untroubled person, and as she grew older her troubles grew with her, but she had an enormous artistic imagination and soul.

There was a contagious magic to his expansiveness,

Kind, fair, and generous, she has the type of self-confidence that comes from having been brought up by parents who not only loved her deeply and well, but who were themselves kind, fair, and generous people.

and caring woman who, like Mother, had a deep and genuine interest in people; this, in turn, translated into

tremendous capacity for friendship and a remarkable ability to put people at their ease.

She was incapable of being unkind,

There were no foreboding shadows, no pensive or melancholic faces, no questions of internal darkness or instability. Her belief that a certain predictability was something that one ought to be able to count upon must

have had its roots in the utter normality

of the people and events captured in these pictures, as well as in the preceding generations of her ancestors who were reliable, stab...

Centuries of such seeming steadiness in the genes could only very partially prepare my mother for all of the turmoil and difficulties that were to face her once she left her...

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.

What they both knew, I am sure, was that I was simply in love with the idea of a strange idea, and that given some other way of expressing my enthusiasms, I would be quite content.

As has been true a thousand times since, my curiosity and temperament had taken me to places I was not really able to handle emotionally,

my curiosity had made strong inroads on my fears.

it is only now that I really begin to understand how desperately important it was to both my intellectual and emotional life to have had my thoughts and enthusiasms given not only respect but active encouragement.

An ardent temperament makes one very vulnerable to dreamkillers, and I was more lucky than I knew in having been brought up around enthusiasts, and lovers of enthusiasts.

Sheep, I thought, Sheep. Then it was my turn. Something inside of me came to a complete boil. It was one too many times watching one too many girls being expected to acquiesce; far more infuriating, it was one too many times watching girls willingly go along with the rites of submission. I refused. A slight matter, perhaps, in any other world, but within the world of military custom and protocol—where symbols and obedience were everything, and where a child’s misbehavior could jeopardize a father’s chance of promotion—it was a declaration of war. Refusing to obey an adult, however absurd the request, simply wasn’t done.

It was finely honed, and one of my father’s typically ingenious solutions to an intrinsically awkward situation.

Once I got over the initial shocks, I found most of my remaining experiences in high school a remarkable sort of education. Some of it was even in the classroom.

His moods still, on occasion, soared; and, when they did, the sparkle and gaiety that flew out from them created a glow, a warmth and joy that filled all of the rooms of the house.

The reasoning was ingenious but

disturbingly idiosyncratic; it also had absolutely nothing to do with the meteorology research that he was being paid to conduct.

With his capacity for flight came grimmer moods, and the blackness of his depressions filled the air as pervasively a...

We experienced together the beginnings of the pain that we each would know, later, alone.

I was used to my mind being my best friend; of carrying on endless conversations within my head; of having a built-in source of laughter or analytic thought to rescue me from boring or painful surroundings. I counted upon my mind’s acuity, interest, and loyalty as a matter of course. Now, all of a sudden, my mind

had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all of my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile. It was incapable of concentrated thought and turned time and again to the subject of death: I was going to die, what difference did anything make?

It took me twice as long to walk anywhere as it ordinarily did, and I wore the same clothes over and over again, as it was otherwise too much of an effort to make a decision about what to put

virtually inert, with a dead heart and a brain as cold as clay.

Laced into the exhaustion were periods of frenetic

and horrible restlessness; no amount of running brought relief.

It was a tribute to my ability to present an image so at variance with what I felt that few noticed I was in any way different.

knew something was dreadfully wrong, but I had no idea what, and I had been brought up to believe that you kept your problems to yourself.

College was, for the most part, a terrible struggle, a recurring nightmare of violent and dreadful moods

spelled only now and again by weeks, sometimes months, of great fun, passion, high enthusiasms, and long runs of very hard but enjoyable work.

These were quite extraordinary, filling my brain with a cataract of ideas and more than enough energy to give me at least the illusion of carrying them out.

Compelled with an immediate and inflaming sense of urgency, I ran off to the bookstore to track down a copy of it, which I did. By the time I left the student union I was weighed down with at least twenty other books, some of which were related to Tennyson’s poem, but others of which

were only very tangentially connected,

they seemed together to contain some essential key to the grandiosely tizzied view of the universe that my mind was beginning to spin.

But then as night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash, and my mind again would grind to a halt. I lost all interest in my schoolwork, friends, reading, wandering, or daydreaming. I had no idea of what was happening to me, and I would wake up in the morning with a profound sense of dread that I was going to have to somehow make it through another entire day. I would sit for hour after hour in the undergraduate library, unable to muster up enough energy to go to class. I would stare out the window, stare at my books, rearrange them, shuffle them around, leave

them unopened, and think about dropping out of college. When I did go to class it was pointless. Pointless and painful. I understood very little of what was going on, and I felt as though only dying would release me from the overwhelming sense of inadequacy and blackness that surrounded me. I felt utterly alone, and watching the animated conversations between my fellow students only made me feel more so. I stopped answering the telephone and took endless hot baths in the vain hope that I might somehow escape from the deadness and dreariness.

On occasion, these periods of total despair would be made even worse ...