An Unquiet Mind

Securing tenure, Jamison writes, is a competitive “blood sport”—as a nonphysician, a woman, and a manic-depressive, she was nervous about pursuing and attaining a tenured position, yet by the early eighties, she needed to find some measure of academic and financial security. Tenure, she writes, became a symbol of the transformation, stability, and recognition against all odds that the ambitious young Kay wanted for herself. The wide-ranging studies she’d undertaken as an assistant professor no longer interested her; she wanted the time and resources to devote herself to the study and treatment of mood disorders, specifically manic-depressive illness.

Jamison had, at that point, set up an outpatient clinic at UCLA specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of depression and manic-depressive illness. Though Jamison herself was not a physician, she helped bring the Affective Disorders Clinic to prominence and used it as a tool to help thousands of patients suffering from mood disorders. The job was chaotic, stressful, and often emotionally devastating—but through a combination of medications and psychotherapy, Jamison and her fellow researchers, clinicians, and physicians made major strides in helping medication-averse patients manage their fluctuating moods. Jamison also drew on her own experiences in order to help her colleagues to understand that there were “advantage[s] as well as disadvantage[s]” to the disorder for its sufferers—and that some patients had perhaps become addicted, as she once was, to the highs of mania. 

In spite of all the fundraising and local outreach Jamison did throughout the early 1980s, she still harbored “enormous” concerns about openly discussing her illness with her colleagues and superiors. She’d seen many other students and residents denied permission to practice due to their own psychiatric illnesses. She still felt severe fluctuations in mood—even on a steady, healthy dose of lithium—and was often out sick for days at a time. Hers was a “tidal existence,” still largely defined by frequent bouts of mania and depression. Still, she maintained an active social life and found that her friends and colleagues accepted her “loopy but intense” personality.

There were few women in Jamison’s social orbit, though, and barely any other women employed in the school’s adult psychiatry division. Several men in the department—such as a man she nicknamed “The Oyster” for his “slithery essence”—still believed that there was something “fundamentally flawed” about women in academia. A dull and callous man, The Oyster enjoyed a lot of power in the department—and so he was protected from any retribution for his steady stream of inappropriate innuendos and his condescending attitude with his female colleagues.

After “rodenting […] through the tenure maze” for years, Jamison was finally promoted to associate professor—she’d secured tenure and joined what one of her colleagues called an “all-men’s club.” Jamison celebrated for weeks, grateful to see her efforts rewarded—and aware that, all the while, she’d been struggling not only against a sexist establishment and a highly-stratified academic bureaucracy, but also against her own mental illness.