Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind

The memoir, An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison is about the author’s struggle with manic-depressive illness. The author Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and coauthor of the standard medical text. She is the daughter of an Air Force officer and was brought up in the Washington, D.C., area and in Los Angeles. She attended UCLA as an undergraduate and as a graduate student in psychology, and she joined the medical school faculty there in 1974. She later founded the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, which has treated thousands of patients for depression and manic-depression. Dr. Jamison was a member of the first National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and is currently

Throughout the book, Kay Jamison struggles to accept her own manic-depressive illness. This is made more difficult by the fact she is a psychologist who specializes in treating mood disorders. She freely admits to her persistent denial that she has a life-long psychosis that could kill her, and to her fixation on the earliest days of her illness when the emotional highs were energizing, enlightening and powerful. She has a very difficult time letting go of what she describes as her own addiction to the ecstatic highs her disease produces. It is an internal argument that she faces throughout the memoir. At the beginning she did not want to accept that she was not normal and ignored the symptoms she was learning about. Also when she did not want to take her medication, she believed that she was perfectly fine and it was only a one time occurrence, but it was not. By writing this book she is trying to convince anyone who has this illness to come out and get treated. Throughout the whole book, she is arguing how dangerous this illness is physically and mentally. Her major points are all that she has been threw. From when she was a young girl who saw a plane crash right in front of her to her father’s struggle with the same illness to her failed marriages and relationships to her violent episodes to her successes to her suicide attempt to her final acceptance and

Manic-depressive illness causes serious shifts in mood, energy, thinking, and behavior—from the highs of mania on one extreme, to the lows of depression on the other. The memoir goes on to explain the author's mental state and how the illness affects her. Since psychology is the science of the mind and behavior and manic-depressive illness is a mental illness, then the illness is directly a part of psychology and should be examined when studying psychology. When talking about how the brain functions, it changes with each different illness a person has and it should be observed how the brain functions when someone is affected by this bipolar