“My major concerns in discussing my illness […] have tended to be professional in nature,” writes Kay Redfield Jamison in the concluding pages of An Unquiet Mind. Throughout the book, as Jamison writes of her struggles with manic-depressive illness (or bipolar disorder, as it’s now more commonly called), she entwines her struggles with mania and depression with her struggles to advance in the worlds of medicine and academia. Throughout Jamison’s undergraduate, masters, and doctorate training in clinical psychiatry at UCLA, she fought to keep the extent of her illness hidden from her colleagues and professors out of fear thst they’d stigmatize her and prevent her from taking on new research opportunities, or otherwise bar her from chasing her dreams of helping others. As Jamison charts her path toward transparency in both her personal and professional lives, she ultimately argues that individuals—especially women and especially people suffering from mental illness—should be able to feel like they can be their authentic selves in their work lives without fear of stigma or discrimination.
Over the course of An Unquiet Mind, Jamison demonstrates how difficult it is for those who have any degree of difference to hold their own in the professional world. She sheds light on the reasons why those very individuals the workplace threatens must be those whose authentic voices, ideas, and experiences are lifted up. Jamison writes about her early years as a researcher at UCLA with a mixture of fondness and lingering fear. Before leveling out thanks to the help of lithium (a mood-stabilizing medication), she writes, she “had developed mechanisms of self-control, to keep down the peals of singularly inappropriate laughter, and set rigid limits on my irritability. […] I learned to pretend I was paying attention or following a logical point when my mind was off chasing rabbits […] My work and professional life flowed.” While Jamison was able to tread water in her professional life and keep things flowing, underneath the surface, she was struggling greatly. Not only was Jamison desperate to hold things together to prove to herself that she was capable of staying on course professionally and academically, but also she was “terrified and deeply embarrassed” by the prospect of losing her job should someone realize the extent of her mania.
Throughout the rest of Jamison’s career, even after surviving a suicide attempt and finding solace in the stabilizing effects of lithium, she struggled to manage the gulf between the personal and the professional. At an American Psychiatric Association conference, Jamison gave a talk about lithium treatment—but, too afraid to share her own personal experience with the drug, she read a testimonial about the medication from a “patient,” never revealing that she was reading her own words and sharing with her colleagues her deepest secrets and feelings. While seeking tenure at UCLA, her alma mater, Jamison undertook an enormous amount of research work in order to prove to both her colleagues and herself that she could keep up with her “sane” counterparts on the faculty, and she describes this period of uncertainty in her life as “high-pressure” yet lonely. In spite of all her concerns for her professional future, she had next to no one she felt comfortable talking to about her specific struggles.
Jamison’s assorted anecdotes demonstrate her internalized need to hide the truth, outperform her “normal” colleagues and coworkers in order to prove herself worthy and capable, and ignore the advantage of firsthand experience with the very struggles and illnesses she was studying. All of these struggles show how societal stigma creates the sense that one cannot be fully authentic in one’s professional life if one is at all different from the norm. Jamison finally felt emboldened to pull back the curtains on her own experience of mental illness—and her family history of manic-depressive illness—when working with a Danish psychiatrist named Mogens Schou during an APA conference. As Mogens opened up about his family history of mood disorders and his academic work on tracing the heredity of such disorders, Jamison felt “trapped, but also relieved” as she opened up to the man about her personal life. Schou immediately and “aggressively” urged Jamison to use her own experiences in her private research and public writing and teaching efforts. There is an overwhelming sense of relief as Jamison describes feeling—for the first time in her professional life—a sense of openness, a lessening of stigma, and permission to be her authentic self.
Kay Redfield Jamison is a lauded professional who has held prestigious positions at UCLA, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. Still, she has had to fight against people—often men—who dismissed her as soon as she revealed that she suffered from manic-depressive illness, even after she’d learned how to reliably manage the effects of her disorder. Jamison views the writing and publishing of An Unquiet Mind as an opportunity to break down the stigma surrounding manic-depressive illness within the workplace, ultimately suggesting that sufferers of the disorder should be afforded the same opportunities for authenticity, transparency, and self-assurance in the workplace as their non-affected counterparts.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Authenticity in the Professional World ThemeTracker
Authenticity in the Professional World Quotes in An Unquiet Mind
Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, […] and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it also has been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders.
The war that I waged against myself is not an uncommon one. The major clinical problem in treating manic-depressive illness is not that there are not effective medications—there are—but that patients so often refuse to take them. Worse yet, because of a lack of information, poor medical advice, stigma, or fear of personal and professional reprisals, they do not seek treatment at all.
[The professor] was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre end original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written.
Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget… […] Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.
I was not only very ill when I first called for an appointment, I was also terrified and deeply embarrassed. I had never been to a psychiatrist or a psychologist before. I had no choice. I had completely, but completely, lost my mind; if I didn’t get professional help, I was quite likely to lose my job, my already precarious marriage, and my life as well.
Obtaining tenure was not only a matter of academic and financial security for me. […] Tenure became a time of both possibility and transformation; it also became a symbol of the stability I craved and the ultimate recognition I sought for having competed and survived in the normal world.
The question also arises whether, ultimately, the destigmatization of mental illness comes about from merely a change in the language or, instead, from aggressive publication efforts; from successful treatments [which] somehow also catch the imagination of the public and media [or] […] from discovery of the underlying genetic or other biological causes of mental illness; […] or from legislative actions, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act… […] Attitudes about mental illness are changing, however glacially, and it is in large measure due to a combination of [all] these things.
Talking with Mogens was extremely helpful, in part because he aggressively encouraged me to use my own experiences in my research, writing, and teaching, and in part because it was very important to me to be able to talk with a senior professor who not only had some knowledge of what I had been through, but who had used his own experiences to make a profound difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Including my own.
It was not without a sense of dread that I waited for [my chairman’s] response to my telling him that I was being treated for manic-depressive illness, and that I needed to discuss the issue of my hospital privileges with him. I watched his face for some indication of how he felt. Suddenly, he reached across the table, put his hand on mine, and smiled. “Kay, dear,” he said, “l know you have manic- depressive illness.” He paused, and then laughed. “If we got rid of all of the manic-depressives on the medical school faculty, not only would we have a much smaller faculty, it would also be a far more boring one.”
