Jackie Danicki

I just read An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins who suffers from manic-depressive illness (aka bipolar disorder, which Jamison finds something of an unhelpful misnomer). Being an award-winning and highly-respected medical professional - and having tenure - helped free her to write candidly about her disorder, her attempted suicide, and how she would either be dead or in a mental hospital if she had not given up her fight against medication to combat her illness.

The book is a quick read, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants a glimpse of what manic depression is like. Dr Jamison is brutally honest in exposing the aspects of her affliction which even her husband (himself a physician and scientist at the National Institutes of Health) finds hard to recognize as a result of her manic depression; as she says, the sleepy, quiet, dark depression is a lot easier to take and understand than the violent manifestations of her illness. She also points out how this violence and furor are all the more hard to take - for others and for herself - because of how they clash with ideas about what is feminine.

I especially appreciated Dr Jamison’s qualified scientific views on mood disorders, and how clearly science shows doubters the very real differences between a psychologically ordered brain, the manic brain, and the depressed brain.

With PET, for example, a depressed brain will show up in cold, brain-inactive deep blues, dark purples, and hunter greens; the same brain when hypomanic, however, is lit up like a Christmas tree, with vivid patches of bright reds and yellows and oranges. Never has the color and structure of science so completely captured the cold inward deadness of depression or the vibrant, active engagement of mania.

I read with interest this interview, which Dr Jamison gave two years after her book was published, in which she is asked whether it was really worth it for her to ‘come out’ as manic depressive.

I think now, two years after the publication of the book, I’d say yes, it was worth it…But has it been costly? For sure…[But] I hadn’t realized the amount of time and energy I put into keeping this illness to myself. I am much more myself publicly than I was before.

Personally, I think those last two lines sum up why, in general, I feel better (if a bit uncomfortable, however briefly or lingeringly) being up-front about my shortcomings and, er, ‘quirks’. It can be exhausting to hide, and you are only polishing a bat with which any bugger who cares to can beat you upside the head. I’m not surprised that Dr Jamison is glad she came out.

One quibble: Dr Jamison admits that questions about how her illness have affected her professional conduct and judgement are fair, and she always went to pains to make sure that doctors who worked closely with her knew about it. She also opened up lines of communication between them and her psychiatrist, insisting they speak to him if they had any questions about her disorder or if they had specific concerns about her behaviour. She says that she is certain various doctors did indeed talk to her psychiatrist in order to assess more completely her illness, but that none ever questioned her judgement or expressed worry about it.

Despite this, she insists that legislation which prohibits employers from declining the job application of someone who is mentally ill is not only a good thing, but a necessary thing. For someone so clever, Dr Jamison has not quite joined the dots between common sense and a utopian vision of a world where mental illness can be disqualified as a condition which may inhibit someone’s ability to do his or her job properly. Good book, though.

Filed under: Books, Happiness, Law, Life, Politics, The State Is Not Your Friend