Book Excerpt: ‘An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness’

The following excerpt is adapted from: An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison; Copyright © 1995 by Kay Redfield Jamison; Published by arrangement with Vintage Books, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC

Read our Q&A with Kay Jamison, here. 

Flights of the Mind

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible.

Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern.

Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.

It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories.

What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again?

Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again?

Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?”

I did not wake up one day to find myself mad. Life should be so simple. Rather, I gradually became aware that my life and mind were going at an ever faster and faster clip until finally, over the course of my first summer on the faculty, they both had spun wildly and absolutely out of control.

But the acceleration from quick thought to chaos was a slow and beautifully seductive one. In the beginning, everything seemed perfectly normal. I joined the psychiatry faculty in July of 1974 and was assigned to one of the adult inpatient wards for my clinical and teaching responsibilities.

I was expected to supervise psychiatric residents and clinical psychology interns in diagnostic techniques, psychological testing, psychotherapy, and, because of my background in psychopharmacology. some issues related to drug trials and medications.

I was also the faculty liaison between the Departments of Psychiatry and Anesthesiology, where I did consultations, seminars, and put into place some research protocols that were designed to investigate psychological and medical aspects of pain.

My own research consisted primarily of writing up some of the drug studies I had carried out in graduate school. I had no particular interest in either clinical work or research related to mood disorders, and as I had been almost entirely free of serious mood swings for more than a year, I assumed that those problems were behind me. Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.

I settled into my new job with great optimism and energy. I enjoyed teaching, and, although it initially seemed strange to be supervising the clinical work of others, I liked it. I found the transition from intern to faculty status far less difficult than I had imagined; it was, needless to say, one that was greatly helped along by an invigorating difference in salary. The relative freedom I had to pursue my own academic interests was intoxicating. I worked very hard and, looking back on it, slept very little.

Decreased sleep is both a symptom of mania and a cause, but I didn’t know that at the time, and it probably would not have made any difference to me if I had. Summer had often brought me longer nights and higher moods, but this time it pushed me into far higher, more dangerous and psychotic places than I had ever been.

Summer, a lack of sleep, a deluge of work, and exquisitely vulnerable genes eventually took me to the back of beyond, past my familiar levels of exuberance and into florid madness.

Kay Jamison’s memoir is available for purchase, here.