An Unquiet Mind: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

One afternoon, while playing outside at her elementary school near the Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., Kay Redfield Jamison and her classmates noticed a plane flying overhead lower than usual. The young Kay didn’t think anything of it at first—she often loved staring up into the sky and imagining the “wild blue yonder” and the blazing sun above. As Kay looked up at the aircraft on that day, however, her wonder turned to horror as the plane crashed into the trees beyond the playground and exploded. Over the next few days, Kay and her classmates would learn that the pilot chose to crash the plane rather than saving his own life by bailing out—which would’ve made him hit the playground below. From then on, Kay could never look at the sky the same way.

Kay’s family, like all military families, moved around a lot—she attended four different elementary schools in several different countries by the time she reached the fifth grade. Her brother, the eldest of her siblings, was her “staunch ally” and role model. Her relationship with her charismatic, rebellious, and beautiful older sister, however, was “complicated”—Kay’s older sister hated military life and resented Kay for being their parents’ golden child. All of that would change, Kay writes, when her “black moods” descended on her later in life. 

Kay goes on to describe her parents. Her father, she says was, an “ebullient [and] funny” man who loved telling stories about the world, who brought home lavish gifts from his frequent travels, who enrolled his children in Russian lessons and bought them copies of old, rare books. Kay’s father was given to excess, yet “there was a contagious magic to his expansiveness,” she writes. Kay’s mother described her husband as a kind of “Pied Piper”—and the description is apt for a man whose charisma and moods brought everyone under his spell. 

Kay’s mother, meanwhile, was more pragmatic—she always wanted to be kind and fair. A conservative and refined woman, Kay’s mother was beautiful and had been popular in high school. As an adult, she hosted tea parties for the Daughters of the American Revolution and focused on homemaking. Kay believes that her mother’s calm was what made her capable of dealing with all of the strife that would accompany the “madness” in her family. 

Kay describes her parents as thoughtful and supportive people who wholeheartedly encouraged her childhood interests—especially her interest in medicine. Kay began volunteering as a candy striper at the Andrews Air Force Base hospital, assisting doctors and nurses with rounds and even minor surgical procedures. Kay was full of endless questions, and, in difficult or repulsive situations such as autopsies, she focused on asking questions and obtaining facts to help “avoid the awfulness” of what was in front of her. The scientific side of her mind, she writes, has always helped her to forge through difficult situations.

At fifteen, Kay and her fellow candy stripers went on a group outing to St. Elizabeths, the federal psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C. The experience was “horrifying.” The “genteel” grounds concealed the nightmare inside the hospital building—Kay and her fellow candy stripers found the ward understaffed, with ninety patients for each orderly. Attendants proclaimed blithely that when patients got too unruly, they were simply “hosed down.” Kay found herself frightened by the women on the ward, yet fascinated, too. She never imagined that one day, she would look into the mirror “and see their sadness and insanity in [her] own eyes.”

As her teen years dawned, however, Kay felt herself increasingly ruled by her moods. Kay grew frustrated during Navy Cotillion, where officers’ children learned etiquette. During a lesson on curtsying, Kay grew infuriated and refused to practice her curtsy. Her father—a colonel to whom manners were important—understood her frustration and helped her come up with a “compromise curtsy.” Kay never imagined that those “uncomplicated days” of her youth would soon come to an end, or that within two years, she’d be psychotic and suicidal.

In 1961, when Kay was 15, her father retired from the Air Force and took a job in California. Their family moved to Los Angeles, and everything in Kay’s world shifted. She attended Pacific Palisades high school—a radically different environment from her buttoned-up D.C. school full of military children. Kay felt lonely and she missed a boyfriend she’d left behind in Washington. She found herself in fierce competition with her classmates and struggled to keep up for a long time. Her classmates were not just academically advanced—socially and sexually, too, they led complicated, mature lives that shocked the sheltered young Kay.

Kay slowly adjusted to life in California. She began volunteering in the pharmacology department at UCLA and there she met a new boyfriend whom she loved. Still, things weren’t always easy. With her brother off at college, her relationship with her sister became much more combative. Her parents’ relationship, too, began to deteriorate—her father’s moods “soared” and blackened without warning, and Kay no longer recognized the man who’d been her friend and ally throughout her childhood. Kay’s own moods, too, began to exhaust those around her—for weeks she’d be “flying high” only to crash into a depression that felt sudden and all-consuming.

During her senior year Kay experienced her first attack of manic-depressive illness. For weeks she “raced about like a crazed weasel” with a sense of invincibility and confidence—and the feeling that there was a “marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness” to everything in her life. After weeks of mania, she came to a “grinding halt.” Depressed, lethargic, and plagued by brain fog and exhaustion, she felt her mind had turned against her.

The only reason Kay was able to dodge her friends’ and teachers’ concerns, she believes, was that “other people […] seldom notice despair in others if those despairing make an effort to disguise the pain.” Kay didn’t dare admit what was happening to her—the reality of her situation frightened her too greatly. Looking back, she says, she is amazed that she survived those terrible months—she feels she experienced a loss of her true self during the episode.