Kay Redfield Jamison

Kay Redfield Jamison was born into a military family on June 22nd, 1946. By the time she was in fifth grade, her family had already lived in Florida, Puerto Rico, California, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. Jamison attended elementary school near the Andrews Air Force Base, worked as a candy striper in and around the D.C. area throughout her early years of high school, and she moved with her family to California in 1961 so that her father could accept a position as a scientist at the Rand Corporation. Jamison attended Pacific Palisades High School and learned to adjust to her new life on the West Coast—but her father’s increasingly difficult battles with mental illness and alcoholism took a toll on Jamison and her family. Jamison herself was, from a young age, the frequent victim of erratic periods of mania followed by stultifying periods of depression—but she chose to ignore her symptoms, which emerged during her senior year of high school, and pursue an advanced education in clinical psychology at the University of California Los Angeles. Throughout her years at UCLA, Jamison battled the tides of mania and depression, struggled to stay on the powerful mood-stabilizing drug lithium, and survived a suicide attempt—all while conducting vital research on mood disorders, helping patients survive their own struggles, and learning lessons about life, love, and the differences between the brain and the mind. Since 1993, Jamison has been a tenured professor of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and has worked at the Mood Disorders Center since 2005. The author of seven books of nonfiction, memoir, and academic writing, Jamison has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the recipient of prestigious grants and awards such as the MacArthur “genius” grant and the Lewis Thomas Prize. Jamison has dedicated her life to understanding, destigmatizing, and educating others about the illness known as bipolar disorder.