An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful.

It took me far too long to realize that lost years and relationships cannot be recovered, that damage done to oneself and others cannot always be put right again, and that freedom from the control imposed by medication loses its meaning when the only alternatives are death and insanity.

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?

“To be sure,” wrote Hugo Wolf, “I appear at times merry and in good heart, talk, too, before others quite reasonably, and it looks as if I felt, too, God knows how well within my skin. Yet the soul maintains its deathly sleep and the heart bleeds from a thousand wounds.”

Somehow, like so many people who get depressed, we felt our depressions were more complicated and existentially based than they actually were.

Decreased sleep is both a symptom of mania and a cause, but I didn’t know that at the time, and it probably would not have made any difference to me if I had.

“It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters … I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.”