Kay Redfield Jamison
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What is Kay Redfield Jamison’s background and why did her memoir *An Unquiet Mind* make such an impact?
All in the mind on ABC Radio National. A warm welcome, Natasha Mitchell joining you. In nineteen ninety five, Professor Kay Redfield Jamison published her Memoir of Moods and Madness, an unquiet mind. And it took the world by storm because he was a leading clinical psychologist, a professor of psychiatry, who'd founded and headed up a mood disorders clinic at a top US medical school. Here she was, revealing her own torrid experience of bipolar disorder, an attempted suicide, and much more. The risk to her career was huge. Well, her story really lifted Manic Depression and the Artistic Temperament, called Touched with Fire, and another called Exuberance, have inspired readers with their compassion and creativity.
She's also the coauthor of The Definitive Medical Text on Bipolar Disorder. Her new memoir is called Nothing Was the Same. That's a story of a deep, passionate love matched by as big a loss.
I was living in London at the time. And we had been talking on the phone and I was really very, very deeply depressed and it frightened him and he didn't know what to do. And so he wrote me a letter.
Dear SK, I have seen the green ice and the ten minute retreats, but last night I heard total blackness. When I was twelve, we visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. The guide said that it was twenty degrees darker than total darkness, a statement I have never understood. I still did not understand it scientifically. I have now, however, felt it. It is like a black hole drawing all light into it. On the phone, I felt life being sucked out of me through the wires. Gladly given. Unfortunately, there was no conservation of matter, and what left me was not to be found on the receptacle on the other end. It was as if there was a total annihilation of substance and energy. It brought back memories of my most primitive childhood nightmare.
Being with you seemed like the only answer. Then I could see it, throw a blanket over it, put a glass. I need some guidelines on the ladder. I need to know when to worry. Is it length of depression or the depth? Is that the crucial issue or some combination? If I ask you, are you taking your medicines? How specific do I need to be? If I ask you are you eating and drinking, do I need to ask you calorie by calorie and glass by glass? What will tell me when you're toxic? In Los Angeles I can call Dan Arbach, who's my psychiatrist. Who do I call in London, Anthony Storr or the Darlington? I am not glad the black hole is there, but I am glad I have seen it. When you fall in love with a star, you accept solar flares, black holes, and all.
Love, Richard. It's it's a it's a very disturbing thing to go back and read love letters. You know, and after he died I read a couple and then I couldn't read anymore. I had thought that I would kind of go and maybe s come back to them in in a month or two. And I d really didn't come back to them for five years. I found them remarkable as I did at the time that he wrote them. He wrote many letters and they were very beautiful and incredibly supportive and incredibly loving. But it was just y y when you see that then you're confronted with what you've lost. You're confronted with the, you know, real presence of of an absence.
In 1985, Kay met Richard Wyatt, and they were together until his death in 2002. Despite Hodgkin's disease nearly killing him in his 30s and major dyslexia, Richard was to become one of the world's leading schizophrenia researchers and chief of neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health. in the US. As you'll hear, they were a meeting of unique minds. But for Richard there was Kay's history of chaotic moods. For Kay, there was to be Richard's cancer. And she joins me today on the programme from Washington. Welcome Kay. Thank you, I'm delighted to Before you met Richard White, how how had manic depression, as I as he called it then, r framed your experience of yourself and the world?
A single word would be chaos. Um I mean it's a chaotic illness and uh there's you know, I'm I'm fortunate in the sense that I have the form of the illness, like many people do, that responds very well to lithium.
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Chapters
3 chapters
1
What is Kay Redfield Jamison’s background and why did her memoir *An Unquiet Mind* make such an impact?
0:00–7:36
2
How does Kay describe the experience of living with bipolar disorder before meeting Richard Wyatt?
7:36–19:57
3
What role did Richard Wyatt play in Kay’s life and how did their partnership influence her work?
19:57–29:56