Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind

The book, “An Unquiet Mind” written in memoir form, Kay Redfield Jamison shares struggles to accept her manic-depressive illness, which was made even more difficult by her profession as a psychologist who specializes in treatment for mood disorders. She dealt with the persistent denial of the lifelong psychosis and the roller coaster episodes, which she references as the “Highs.” By presenting her story in the form of a personal memoir, Jamison can freely relate to the reader how her emotional “Highs” pleasantly intoxicating, which gave her more confidence, energy and clarity. However, the adrenaline-charged experience always followed by debilitating depression. Then her manic cycles became frightening, slipping into complete detachment from reality, which fully caught her in the vice of psychosis. The depressive part of her illness, as it intensified, caused contemplation and attempted suicide, believing that her own body was in a rotten form. She referred to manic-depression as “A strange and driving force, a destroyer and a …show more content…
Envisage links to deep depression that left her exhausted, unable to function or focus on school or any other aspects of life. Therefore leading to the crutch of alcohol in orange juice to make it through a school day. During college years, this same pattern, later more intense with suffering and confusion, repeated itself until she found support from a psychiatrist and began taking a medication called lithium. Jamison, explains, “The pattern of shifting moods and energies has a seductive side to it, in large part because of fitful reinfusions of the intoxicating moods that I had enjoyed in high school. But then as the night inevitably goes after the day, my mood would crash and my mind again would grind to a