When she was highly depressed, her psychiatrist tried to persuade her to go to hospital, but she refused. When she first met with a psychiatrist, “the questions were familiar, I had asked them of others a hundred times, but I found it unnerving to have to answer them, unnerving not to know where it was all going, and unnerving not to realize how confusing it was to be a patient.” Her work as a psychologist impacted how she experienced and managed her illness and its treatment. She thought of medications as something that “might be indicated for psychiatric patients, for those of weaker stock, but not for us.” She was placed on high doses of lithium, which caused considerable side effects including nausea and impaired coordination, and at times she ended up with toxic blood levels. Several factors played into her reluctance to take medication, including a wish not to be brought down from the highs of mania. It took a long time for her to accept that she needed to remain on medication, and there were multiple occasions when she stopped her meds and then experienced a relapse of mania. Even once she recognized that she was struggling with her mental health, fear and shame stopped her from seeking treatment. She is very open about her struggle to accept her diagnosis and the attached stigma. Many of the challenges Jamison has faced will sound very familiar to anyone living with a mood disorder. She described the “particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness… You are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and totally enmeshed in the blackest caves of the mind.”

The author is extremely insightful, and she does an excellent job of capturing in words what mental illness feels like. There’s no attempt to gloss over the messy and downright ugly bits of mental illness. The book contains rich descriptions, and it’s searingly honest. The book captures her journey with bipolar, from its emergence in her late teens to its effects on her accomplished career as a clinical psychologist and university professor. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison is an intimate look into the havoc that bipolar disorder can wreak.

An unquiet mind book review