An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison : Book on bipolar disorder (manic-depression)

An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison, PH.D.

Printed on the cover jacket of the book:

From Kay Redfield Jamison - an international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who are full professors of medicine at American universities - a remarkable personal testimony: the revelation of her own struggle since adolescence with manic-depression, and how it has shaped her life.

Vividly, directly, with cando, wit, and simplicity, she takes us into the fascinating and dangerous territory of this form of madness - a world in which one pole can be the alluring dark and ruled by what Byton called the "melancholy start of the imagination," and the other a desert of depression and, all too frequently, death.

Child of a brilliant, mercurial Air Force officer and scientist and a remarkable mother descended from an old New England family, Kay Jamison suffered her first attack of manic-depression at seventeen. We follow her battle with the illness through college, through graduate school, through a passionate love affair and desperate loss, through episodes of violence, bouts of madness, and attempted suicide. We experience her fear of letting go of the intoxicating highs and her deep-rooted belief that she should weather the illness without medication - a fear that leads her to resist taking lithium, the drug that would utimately save her life. And, finally, she recounts the slow and painful mastering of her illness through knowledge, courage, medication, self-discipline, and the power of love.

A moving and exhilarating memoir by a woman whose furious determination to learn the enemy, to use her gifts of intellect to make a difference, led her to become, by the time she was forty, a world authority on manic-depression, and whose work has helped saved countless lives.

Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is the author of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive illness and the Artistic Temperament, and coauthor of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness, chosen in 1990 as the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the Association of American Publishers. The recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, Dr. Jamison is a member of the National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as well as the clinical director of the Dana Consortium on the Genetic Basis of Manic-Depressive Illness. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a physician and scientist at the National Institutes of Health.

Taken from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kay_Redfield_Jamison
Kay Redfield Jamison (born June 22, 1946) is an American clinical psychologist and writer who is one of the foremost experts on bipolar disorder. She is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.