An Unquiet Mind: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Kay Redfield Jamison continues describing the “bitter harvest” she reaped by failing to take lithium for over a year and a half. Though she was miserable each and every day whether she was experiencing mania or depression, she was unable to commit to taking the medication. Her thoughts became dark, desolate, and hopeless, and she thought of death constantly. She became fatigued and lethargic—something as simple as taking a shower became a herculean task which took hours to complete.

Eventually, Kay resumed her lithium regimen. She continued seeing her psychiatrist several times a week, but nothing seemed to help with Kay’s suicidal ideation. Due to California commitment laws, her psychiatrist could not have her hospitalized against her will—though he wrote in his notes that she was a definite suicide risk. Kay refused to submit to hospitalization—she was too afraid that if her manic-depressive illness became public knowledge at UCLA, she would lose her clinical privileges and be unable to complete her studies. Feeling as if she had nowhere to turn, Kay resolved to kill herself—but she shielded her intent from her psychiatrist.

Kay describes a hazy memory in which an unnamed man—possibly her colleague or her first husband—visited her apartment at the height of her suicidality to find her in a crazed state. Throwing furniture and bleeding in only her underwear, Kay purposefully attempted to scare the man off—he had, ostensibly, come to check on her or to make love to her. Raging and weeping alone in her apartment once again, Jamison writes, she finally understood “why Jekyll killed himself before Hyde had taken over completely,” and she proceeded to take a massive overdose of lithium.

Jamison writes that she felt suicide was the only way out of the unrelenting agony that was an eighteen-month-long suicidal depression. After taking an anti-emetic to keep herself from vomiting up the lithium, she swallowed her entire bottle of pills. She curled up in bed, waiting to die—but when the phone rang, she answered it to find her brother on the other end. Hearing Kay’s slurred voice, he called her psychiatrist. She was hospitalized immediately and spent several days in a coma.

While Kay was in the hospital recovering from her overdose, her psychiatrist and a close male friend from UCLA who had been checking up on her each day for several months made a plan for her recovery. Between the two of them, they planned to stay with her day and night and nurse her through the trying times ahead. Jamison writes that she owes her life to both of the men who led her down the “cold and colder and colder still” road “from suicide to life.” Kay’s mother, too, stayed with her for a long while and helped her readjust to life outside the hospital. Her mother, she writes, helped her to temper the “unbroken horse” of manic-depressive illness—an illness Kay inherited, she now knows, from her father.

Jamison describes her experience with the violence that her manias and depressions alike inspired in her—she admits to having been “physically assaultive” as well as verbally abusive in the midst of her “blind manic rages.” She feels ashamed, she writes, to remember her darkest moments—but having gained distance from them, she experiences mostly gratitude to the friends, lovers, and family members who stuck by her side through the worst of her rages. In the wake of her suicide attempt, she says, part of her biggest task was reconciling all the different parts of herself: the gifted student, the rageful woman, the young girl who once attended cotillion balls and dinners at the Officers’ Club.

Kay writes that the flip side of the violent rage her mania brought on is the “fiery” attitude she had most of her life—there existed for her a fine line, she writes, between her passionate personality and her manic alter ego. The depressions she experienced were “more in line with society’s notions of what women are all about,” while her manias—which brought on aggressive behaviors normally associated with men—were less “tolerated” by those around her than her black states of woe. Manic-depressive illness, like fire, Jamison writes, “both creates and destroys.” The fire she felt in her blood, even after she evened out on lithium, would be essential to the next hurdle ahead of her: the pursuit of academic tenure at UCLA.