An Unquiet Mind: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

At eighteen, Kay enrolled as an undergraduate at UCLA. She had hoped to attend the University of Chicago, but her father’s erratic moods and deepening alcoholism had cost him his job and there was little money for college. Kay soon found herself enjoying her life at UCLA—though her happiness couldn’t shield her from the ongoing pain within her mind. College was a constant battle against her ever-shifting moods. When seized by mania, Kay became sensual, outspoken, obsessed with drawing unlikely connections between the many subjects she was studying, and compelled to spend money irresponsibly to the point of over-drafting her bank account.

These bouts of mania inevitably gave way to depressions which numbed Kay to the world around her, filled her with an unspecific but “profound” dread, and rendered her unable to focus in class or connect with friends. The racing thoughts characteristic of mania remained, but instead of being “exuberant and cosmic,” the thoughts were horrific, graphic, and violent. Kay felt unable to ask for help, and now, upon looking back, can see that she didn’t even understand that she was ill.

This period in Jamison’s life was painful, but she admits that there was one bright stroke of luck. Although she was a freshman, she was taking an upper-level psychology course. One day, the professor asked the class to conduct written responses to images from the Rorschach test—a series of inkblots meant to be interpreted by psychiatric patients to help determined their mindset and provide insight into their associations. Kay, in a manic state, filled “page after page” with strange responses. The professor read some of the students’ work out loud anonymously—and when he got to Kay’s responses, asked that the student who’d written them stay after class.

Kay was “terrified” that the professor had seen in her responses something terribly wrong—but when she met him after class, he brought her back to his office to tell her that her responses had been “imaginative.” Jamison states that this was her first lesson in recognizing the “complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre and original thought.” The professor, impressed by Kay’s rebelliousness in taking a class meant for seniors as a freshman, invited her to apply to be his lab assistant. Kay gratefully agreed to help the professor in his studies on “the structure of human personality” by coding data, designing studies, and writing up scientific papers. Though Kay loved working as a research assistant, her academics suffered as a result of her cycling moods, and she began to feel stifled and stymied.

At twenty, as her junior year was about to start, Kay took some time off from UCLA to study at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland—her brother and cousin were studying in England, and she wanted to be nearby. A federal grant allowed Kay to focus on her studies there full-time rather than relying on side jobs or apprenticeships to help pay tuition—and with that, Kay was off. In St. Andrews, Kay found happiness and fulfillment in spite of the harsh weather. She took courses in zoology, learned a lot, made friends, and found refuge in the peace and calm that being in the “ancient” and “mystical” city provided. Jamison describes St. Andrews in loving, lush detail, recalling her time there as a “marrow experience”—in other words, something deeply impactful on who she was and who she has become.

When she was twenty-one, Jamison returned to UCLA—the abrupt shift made it difficult to settle into her old routines. In addition to readjusting to her work, school, and social life, she had her moods to contend with. She decided to further her studies in psychology and accepted another apprenticeship with a second professor in the psychology department to study the effects of mood-altering drugs. The professor leading the study was himself, Jamison writes, given to mood swings—he understood her struggles with moods as well, though they rarely discussed their shared struggle. Only once did they speak about their moods—and about the possibility of taking antidepressants—but both, Jamison says, had too much “pride” to seek help from medication.

In 1971, Jamison began her doctoral studies in psychology at UCLA. With her moods more difficult to control than ever, she made a last-ditch effort at improving her state of mind—not by seeing a psychiatrist or seeking out medication, but by buying a horse. The horse was stubborn, neurotic, and prone to lameness, and Jamison sank a lot of money from her graduate fellowship into boarding and treating the horse before acknowledging he was too much for her to take care of and selling him.

Jamison began enjoying graduate school in a way she never did college—looking back now, she can see that she was in remission from manic-depressive illness, largely free from the manias and depressions that had defined the previous several years of her life. She got married to a French artist who was kind, gentle, apolitical, and passionate. Although she was in a kind of remission, Jamison was still an intense person—throughout their relationship, she was restless and volatile, and yet her first husband’s steadiness and calm helped balance their relationship out. Jamison felt “harbored” with her husband.

Jamison soon chose a specialty in clinical psychology, a move that allowed her to see patients and learn how to make clinical diagnoses. Even then, however, she writes that she was profoundly unable to make a connection between the illnesses she was diagnosing in her patients and the manic-depressive illness she suffered from herself. Looking back now, she writes that her “denial and ignorance seem virtually incomprehensible.” 

Jamison writes that, at the time, the emphasis on treating patients was based in talk therapy, understanding dreams, and other aspects of psychoanalysis. Centering diagnosis, symptoms, and medical treatment through prescription drugs wouldn’t become popular until after Jamison had already entered her internship at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute years later. She writes that, although she believes medications such as lithium and antidepressants are indispensable in treating severe mood disorders—and that to treat these diseases without medication is, in some cases, malpractice—she is nonetheless grateful for her background in psychoanalytic thought. 

Jamison did, however, balk at the use of psychological and intelligence tests such as the Rorschach test and the WAIS, or Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale. When she administered them to her husband as part of a test for class, his results, scored according to the tests’ metrics, rendered him “sociopathic” and “deeply disturbed.” To lessen the disappointment of finding herself disillusioned with many psychoanalytic practices, Jamison threw herself into her relationships with her patients and her coursework. After completing her coursework, her doctoral dissertation, and her final oral examination, Jamison was awarded her Ph.D. and hired as an assistant professor. Within three months of the momentous appointment, she writes, she would be “ravingly psychotic.”