Years Later, a Quieter Mind

When psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D., wrote An Unquiet
Mind, an account of her struggles with manic depressive illness--which
she has both experienced and studied--she expected modest sales, mostly
to people who had been directly affected by the disorder. But the 1995
book was a surprise hit, spending five months on the New York Times
best-seller list and selling more than 400,000 copies. Part of its appeal
came from the fascinating contrast between Jamison's elegant prose and
the extreme, often brutal experiences she recounted. In person, the
incongruity is even more startling: Jamison is graceful and
self-possessed, but speaks frankly about the harrowing realities of
mental illness.

Seated in her office at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in
Baltimore, Jamison reflects on the personal and professional price of
that candor. Asked whether she would do it all again, she pauses for a
long moment. "I think now, two years after the publication of the book,
I'd say yes, it was worth it," she says at last. "But has it been costly?
For sure." Jamison does acknowledge relief at being able to drop the
"Brooks Brothers conservative" image she adopted to conceal her disorder,
saying, "I hadn't realized the amount of time and energy I put into
keeping this illness to myself. I am much more myself publicly than I was
before." Her colleagues have been supportive, she says, and her status as
a tenured professor made the disclosure less risky for her than for most
people. "But you also have more to lose under those circumstances,
because you've spent a long time building a certain reputation as a
scientist," adds Jamison. "All of a sudden, your work is subject to
questions: `What was her motivation? Was she objective?'"

It's not just her research that has undergone reappraisal. "As soon
as somebody knows that you have a mental illness, they treat you
differently," she says. "Particularly if you've written about being
psychotic and delusional, people will question your judgment, your
rationality." Jamison talks with resignation about the inevitable loss of
privacy: "It would be disingenuous to write such a personal book and not
expect people to respond." Perhaps more painful, though, was giving up
her therapy practice. "I spent many years learning to be a clinician, and
I loved doing it," she says. "But I've written a highly personal book.
Patients have the right to walk into an office and deal with their own
problems, not with what they construe their therapist's problems to
be."

Despite her very public "coming out," Jamison still counsels
caution to those considering revealing their illness to employers and
others. Her emphasis is on encouraging people to acknowledge their mental
disorders to themselves, and to get treatment. "There's no excuse in this
day and age for seventeenth-century notions of mental illness," says
Jamison, whose own manic-depression went untreated for years until it was
brought under control by lithium "If you don't discuss it and don't seek
treatment, you can die, and ruin a lot of lives around you."

Jamison saw some of those lives for herself while traveling the
country to promote An Unquiet Mind. "At almost every talk I gave,
somebody would come up to me with a photograph of a kid who had committed
suicide," she relates. "The devastation was unbearable, all of that
unnecessary pain and suffering. It just broke my heart." Jamison's next
book, Night Falls Fast, will deal head-on with the topic of suicide,
exploring the implications of recent neurological and psychological
research. "It's been a relief to turn back to science," says Jamison.
"You get into this business of talking about your own experiences and you
forget why you went into science," " she continues, "which is that it's
really interesting."

Also gratifying, she says, is her work on yet another book.
Tentatively titled Beyond Dr. Doolittle, it's about medicine and science
at the National Zoo. "The doctors there are confronted with an
extraordinary range of medical problems," says Jamison. "Imagine treating
500 different species!" She pauses, then smiles. "Doctors around here
have enough problems with just one."