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Life has been rather trying of late and I’ve been in need of some rather stiff medicine, hence I recently picked up Kay Redfield Jamison’s “An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness“. Professor Jamison teaches psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and also happens to suffer from the very disease she is a top expert on: manic-depression. As a result, she has a unique view of this most common mental illness (especially within the creative community): that of both doctor and patient. She also happens to be an incredibly gifted writer, who is able to humanise and explain a complex illness as well as write an unbearably moving memoir, all rendered in clear, simple, haunting prose.

Her candour in describing her own emotions, her relationships with her family, her loves, above all, her own life-long struggle (including her long years of denial) with her severe illness, all with the objectivity and knowledge of the trained medical doctor, as well as the sensitivity and perceptiveness of the born poet, has resulted in one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Life today is highly stressful and it is very difficult to admit to mental illness in most modern societies.

In addition, sometimes, these highly seductive mental states of dysfunction become so much a part of a person’s identity that the terrors become normal and healing is a long, long path, fraught with minefields every step of the way. Jamison knows. She has been there. Even as she attempted to heal others, she herself was spinning ever deeper into the abyss. Her journey out of that darkness back into the light of life, recounted with quiet, wistful reflection, is all the more moving for her deep technical knowledge of the subject matter, which informs every page. While her specific focus is on manic-depression, her book is also applicable, as a courageous memoir, to many other forms of mental illness, clinical depression not least among them.

If you are interested in what it truly means to have a mental illness, know someone who is currently suffering, or yourself are walking or have been through this dark valley, Jamison’s extraordinary, levelheaded, brilliant, quiet, and wise book may give you a fresh understanding and perhaps even help change your life.

Signing off,
Biblioboy