As a founder of UCLA's Affective Disorder Clinic and a co-author of a standard medical text, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison may be the foremost authority on manic-depressive illness. She is also one of its survivors. And it is this dual perspective — as healer and healed — that makes Jamison's memoir so lucid, learned, and profoundly affecting. <BR>Even as she was pursuing her psychiatric training, Jamison found herself succumbing to the exhilarating highs and paralyzing lows that afflicted many of her patients. Though the disorder brought her seemingly boundless energy and mercurial creativity, it also propelled her into spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempt at suicide. <BR>Powerfully candid, exceptionally wise, An Unquiet Mind is one of those rare books that has the power to transform lives — and even save them.

"What makes this account of the author's life-long struggle with manic depressive illness so gripping—and so important—is that she is both victim and healer. As a professor of psychiatry at UCLA and Johns Hopkins, Kay Jamison treated manic depression in her patients, studied its causes and effects, and wrote award-winning papers and textbooks on the topic. But until this memoir, she never spoke publicly about her own experience of the disease. From her late teenage years, Jamison found herself alternating between exhilarating highs and terrible black depressions. In her mildly manic states she found herself vastly productive and creative, enjoying higher energy, greater concentration, and magnified self-confidence. In her depression she became suicidal. While lithium helped restrain her mood swings, for years Jamison was loathe to live mundanely, until psychotherapy convinced her that without the drug she would soon be dead or hopelessly insane. Neither preachy nor aggrieved, this book is tough-minded but gently written." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

Kay Redfield Jamison lives in Washington, DC.