An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison

() An exquisite portrayal of the intellectualization coping method. In this case, it is utilized to deal with Bipolar I disorder.

The author writes about her life, namely in relation to her illness, love, and her career. She has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology that she obtained from UCLA, and is now a professor at John Hopkins University. Though her story doesn't deviate much from the previous books I have read and reviewed about Bipolar I individuals, there are some slight unique qualities to this book.

For one, she is able to look back at her life and state that if she had a choice, she would still choose to have manic-depressive illness. She goes into detail as to why: "I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; [...] seen the finest and most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are. [...] But normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness - the intensity it gives to things and the perspective it forces on me. I think it has made me test the limits of my mind [...]" (pg. 218)

She admits that she came into her career and succeeded in her profession mostly because of, in subservience and thanks to, her bipolar disorder. "I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it also has been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders. The disease that [...] does kill tens of thousands of people every year: most are young, most die unnecessarily, and many are among the most imaginative and gifted that we as a society have." (pg. 5)

Other quotes that give further insight into the mystery of the illness:
"The world was filled with pleasure and promise; I felt great. [...] I felt I could do anything, that no task was too difficult. My mind seemed clear, fabulously focused, and able to make intuitive mathematical leaps that had up to that point entirely eluded me. Indeed, they elude me still. At the time, however, not only did everything make perfect sense, but it all began to fit into a marvelous kind of cosmic relatedness. [...] Slow down, Kay." (pg. 37)
"Looking back I am amazed I survived, that I survived on my own, and that high school contained such complicated life and palpable death. I aged rapidly during those months, as one must with such loss of one's self, with such proximity to death, and such distance from shelter." (pg. 40)
"Shyness does, and 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 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." (pg. 67)
"Fragments of ideas, images, sentences, raced around and around in my mind like the tigers in a children's story. Finally, like those tigers, they became meaningless melted pools. Nothing once familiar to me was familiar. I wanted desperately to slow down but could not. Nothing helped - not running around a parking lot for hours on end or swimming for miles. My energy level was untouched by anything I did. Sex became too intense for pleasure, and during it I would feel my mind encased by black lines of light that were terrifying to me. My delusions centered on the slow painful deaths of all the green plants in the world - vine by vine, stem by stem, leaf by leaf they died, and I could do nothing to save them. Their screams were cacophonous. Increasingly, all of my images were black and decaying." (pg. 83)
"No pill can help me deal with the problem of not wanting to take pills; likewise, no amount of psychotherapy alone can prevent my manias and depressions. I need both. It is an odd thing, owing life to pills, one's own quirks and tenacities, and this unique, strange, and ultimately profound relationship called psychotherapy." (pg. 89)
"More fundamentally, I genuinely believed - courtesy of strong-willed parents, my own stubborness, and a WASP military upbringing - that I ought to be able to handle whatever difficulties came my way without having to rely upon crutches such as medication." (pg. 99)
"The endless questioning finally ended. My psychiatrist looked at me, there was no uncertainty in his voice. 'Manic-depressive illness.' I admired his bluntness. I wished him locusts on his lands and a pox upon his house. Silent, unbelievable rage. I smiled pleasantly. He smiled back. The war had just begun." (pg. 104)
"There were limits on what any of us could do for him, and it tore me apart inside. We all move uneasily within our restraints." (pg. 109)
"Patient reluctant to be with people when depressed because she feels her depression is such an intolerable burden on others" (pg. 112)
"Ironically, it is usually the doctors who are the most competent and conscientious who feel the most sense of failure and pain." (pg. 127)
"the positive aspects of the illness that can arise during the milder manic states: heightened energy and perceptual awareness, increased fluidity and originality of thinking, intense exhilaration of moods and experience, increased sexual desire, expansiveness of vision, and a lengthened grasp of aspiration. I tried to encourage our clinic doctors to see that this was an illness that could confer advantage as well as disadvantage, and that for many individuals these intoxicating experiences were highly addictive in nature and difficult to give up." (pg. 128)
"'Resembling, 'mid the torture of the scene, / Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.' But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine. As John Donne has written, it is not so pure and abstract as one might once have thought and wished, but it does endure, and it does grow." (pg. 175)
"When I first thought about writing this book, I conceived of it as a book about moods, and an illness of moods, in the context of an individual life. As I have written it, however, it has somehow turned out be very much a book about love as well: love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector. After each seeming death within my mind or heart, love has returned to re-create hope and to restore life." (pg. 215)