In An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison tells the story of her life—a life which has been affected since her adolescence by the constant presence and pressure of what she calls manic-depressive illness, a mental illness now most commonly known as bipolar disorder. As a mentally-ill person, Jamison wrestles with what “madness” truly means—she investigates the difference between the brain and the mind, the link between bipolar disorder and creativity, and the unlikely gifts and enormous range of feeling her illness has given her over the course of her life. Ultimately, Jamison suggests that people should seek to expand and complicate their ideas of madness and try to understand how difference and difficulty can enhance rather than merely derail a person’s life.
Madness, for Jamison, is not easily definable. Madness does not comprise a certain set of thoughts, opinions, behaviors, or problems—rather, it is more like a place, a “florid” setting in which one’s capacity for violence, love, creativity, and destruction are all heightened. The subtitle of An Unquiet Mind is “A Memoir of Moods and Madness,” and, indeed, throughout the pages of the memoir, Jamison shows how madness is a complex subject—and how her own experience with the state known as insanity has, counterintuitively, expanded her point of view and enhanced her experience of being alive. As Jamison writes of her early experiences with manic-depressive illness, she describes how her fear of her own madness and psychosis often overlapped with a sense of invincibility, boundless creativity, and confidence. As such, she suggests that there are “complicated, permeable boundaries” between madness and sanity. As a senior in high school, Jamison experienced her first attack of manic-depressive illness. She “lost [her] mind,” she says, “rather rapidly” as she cycled through a period of ecstatic mania and then crashed into a spell of devastating depression. Though she knew that what was happening to her was “dreadfully wrong,” she tried to keep her fear and uncertainty to herself. In college, as she continued to struggle with her undiagnosed illness, she found a “seductive side” to the “pattern of shifting moods and energies” through which she was perpetually cycling. When a college psychology professor, intrigued by Jamison’s answers to an in-class exercise on the Rorschach test, pulled her aside to compliment her “imaginative” nature, Jamison began to see that there was a “positive rather than pathological” perspective to what she was going through. This shift prompted Jamison to start a course of study in psychology that would change her life forever. Jamison’s recollections of her earliest experiences with manic-depressive illness reveal her own prejudices against the idea of “madness” and her desire to try to either ignore her symptoms or reframe them into a positive light. Though some of this impulse comes from shame and fear, Jamison thinks that perhaps she delayed seeking treatment because she enjoyed the “imaginative” and “positive” aspects of mania, which suggests that there is more to so-called madness than meets the eye.
“My family and friends expected that I would welcome being ‘normal,’” Jamison writes of her early experiences taking the mood-stabilizing medication lithium. But in spite of other people’s expectations of her, Jamison felt in denial about the serious of her disorder and full of a “horrible sense of loss for who I had been [without lithium.]” Mania made Jamison feel as if she had the “stars at [her] feet”—the world opened up to her during her manic episodes in spite of how detrimental they were to many aspects of her physical and mental well-being. She writes that even in the present, she still “compare[s her]self with the best [she has] been”—which, she feels, was when she was “mildly manic.” Ultimately, Jamison declares that even if she had the choice to live her life free of manic-depressive illness, she would want her circumstances to stay the same—in other words, she doesn’t believe she’d be the person she is without the influences, good and bad, of her disorder. Her feeling on the matter is complicated, but she asserts that her experiences have allowed her into “limitless corners [of the human experience], with […] limitless views.” Madness, then, is not what ordinary people might imagine it to be—it is something infinitely more complicated.
An Unquiet Mind is a book about “moods and madness”—and within it, Kay Redfield Jamison seeks a softer definition of “madness” and insanity that might broaden and destigmatize people’s understanding of mental illness. Manic-depressive illness indeed destabilized much of Jamison’s early life and wreaked havoc on her mental and emotional health—but ultimately, she argues that to write off the life she’s lived as one defined by madness, or to do the same to others facing similar struggles, is to do a disservice to an entire community of intelligent, creative, capable individuals.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Madness ThemeTracker
Madness 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.
I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value.
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.
Now he made no judgments about my completely irrational purchases; or, if he did, at least he didn’t make them to me. Courtesy of a personal loan he had taken out […] we were able to write checks to cover all of the outstanding bills. Slowly, over a period of many years, I was able to pay him back what I owed him. More accurate, I was able to pay back the money I owed him. I can never pay back the love, kindness, and understanding.
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.
Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty and I don’t see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at is being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. […] It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.
I genuinely believed […] I ought to be able to handle whatever difficulties came my way without having to rely upon crutches such as medication.
I was not the only one who felt this way. When I became ill, my sister was adamant that I should not take lithium... […] She made it clear that she thought I should “weather it through” my depressions and manias, and that my soul would wither if I chose to dampen the intensity and pain of my experiences by using medication. […] One evening, now many years ago, she tore into me for […] “lithiumizing away my feelings.”
The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth.
Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys. […] Mania is a strange and driving force, a destroyer, a fire in the blood. Fortunately, having fire in one’s blood is not without its benefits in the world of academic medicine…
There a time when I honestly believed that there was only a certain amount of pain one had to go through in life. Because manic-depressive illness had brought such misery and uncertainty in its wake, I presumed life should therefore be kinder to me in other, more balancing ways. But then I also had believed that I could fly through starfields and slide along the rings of Saturn.
No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. […] But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine.
I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. […] It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.
So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; […] seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.
Even when I have been most psychotic—delusional, hallucinating, frenzied—I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful and took my breath away…. […] Some of them were grotesque and ugly and I never wanted to know they were there or to see them again. But, always, there were those new corners and—when feeling my normal self, beholden for that self to medicine and love—I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of those limitless corners, with their limitless views.
