Review: An Unquiet Mind
I wrote this book review for an extra credit task in my problem identification class at the University of Rochester. I have included my review below.
Review: An Unquiet Mind
I listened to An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison for the extra credit task. This memoir details the struggles Redfield Jamison had leading up to and after receiving a Bipolar diagnosis. What makes the story more compelling, I believe, is that Redfield Jamison herself obtained her PhD in clinical psychology and acted as an academic researcher on Bipolar, so we gain additional insight from her education mixed with her personal experience. Redfield Jamison begins the story by telling of her youth, including her upbringing in what seemed to be a privileged upper-class military family. Her family appears to have been part of more traditional circles emphasizing conservative values. Yet, her parents were unusually supportive of Redfield Jamison's pursuit of education and career, highlighting modern feminist values within this more patriarchal circle.
Her father was a driven scientist who also appeared to have mood fluctuations, which Redfield Jamison considers as potentially being an origin of her later diagnosis. Redfield Jamison describes one particular incident in her youth, where she saw a pilot whose plane was about to crash over a children's playground. The pilot decided, instead of ejecting to save his life, to divert the plane to crash and die on unoccupied grounds in order to potentially save the lives of children. Redfield Jamison describes this as a pivotal moment in her development that instilled a strong idea of duty. Redfield Jamison describes the onset of her Bipolar symptoms as she enters early adulthood. Unlike her high moods in adolescence, she enters periods of mania for the first time in college, where she describes having a feeling of limitless energy, grand ideas, exuberant confidence, and going on spending sprees.
This initial manic state was followed by crushing depression. Redfield Jamison sought treatment for her depression, and psychiatrists told her she had Bipolar, yet she did not embrace the diagnosis. Doctors prescribed her Lithium, which she took intermittently, as she did not enjoy the side effects. In one particularly deep depressive episode, she attempted to take her own life by overdosing on Lithium. Redfield Jamison describes how her family barely saved her and how painful the recuperation after this overdose was. At this point, Redfield Jamison begins to take her diagnosis seriously, accepts a belief that she has Bipolar illness, and commits to taking medication. Throughout this period, Redfield Jamison was also married; her marriage ended in divorce due to the challenges of her illness.
Redfield Jamison continues her memoir by describing her academic career, her romantic relationships, and her continued battle with Bipolar. A key relationship for her was a British professor whom she met while establishing her academic career as a psychologist. The professor appeared to be a passionate and intense man. Sadly, he passed away from a heart attack, which left Redfield Jamison devastated. After this, Redfield Jamison appeared to stabilize somewhat in her career, and in her medication, she met and fell in love with Richard Wyatt, a psychiatrist, who had an even more calming force on her. Overall, we end the story with Redfield Jamison firm in her belief that Bipolar is a medical illness, that Lithium is the proper treatment for it, and that through this, she has finally achieved a kind of peace in her life. She says that due to Lithium, she believes her Bipolar was worthwhile and would have preferred to have it than not.
My impression of this story is that it is incomplete. My belief in Bipolar illness is that it is a biopsychosocial illness. Whilst Redfield Jamsison may not have been conscious of it, I believe many biopsychosocial forces created and maintained her illness. Our author does not seem to account for unconscious psychological or social forces. To start with, unconscious psychological forces I see at play in the book include Redfield Jamison's alcoholism; she seems to venerate alcohol and drink it in excess. Many of her relationships involve excessive alcohol use. She also appears to have a hyperactive sex drive, with many of her actions and relationships are about the valuation and pursuit of sex. She also seems superficial in idolizing social hierarchy, status, and knowledge, specifically medical knowledge. She runs in circles of massive egos of psychiatrists, and she feeds into this through her pursuits of medical knowledge and the idolization of figures in the field.
Redfield Jamison's relationship with her father seems very important to me. I believe that she possibly was sexually attracted to him, and her life pursuits were trying to find a replacement for her father in her romantic relationships, as well as striving to emulate him personally. Redfield Jamison identifies with her father and "others" her mother; in this way, she may be animus-possessed. She fails to identify with or see a feminine side within herself, except that which can be played out in hedonistic sexual submission to her partners. We also see at a social level the highly unique position Redfield Jamison was placed in socially. Redfield Jamison is part of a privileged upper-class conservative system that advocated for women's place being in the home, yet was in a family system that in many ways was conservative yet also uniquely valued a feminist idealism of providing Redfield Jamison with an education and encouraging her to pursue a high-powered career. This conflict must have created great psychic tension for her.
Redfield Jamison mentions spirituality in the book, yet it seems to be interlinked with the conservative value system in which she is enmeshed. She appears to be seeking her whole life for a man to replace her father, to allow her to continue being a little girl, because she does not see any models of femininity that exist for her as an adult woman. In this sense, she idolizes the "great man" as if he were her god and spends her life seeking him in her partner. She is always looking up for greatness and never spending time serving those beneath her or even recognizing people worse off than her in her life. In this way, too, she misses out on the joy of giving to those less fortunate, including the joy of having children.
Overall, I believe that she could have been healed if Redfield Jamison had integrated her feminine side. She would need to reject the society that she was enmeshed in, the patriarchal, egotistical, scientific, hedonistic society that she couldn't see past. She would have needed to stop drinking alcohol and stop pursuing sex, academic achievement, and social status. Maybe she could have moved to a small farm in the middle of nowhere or maybe a spiritual retreat center, where she could find other strong women as peers and role models and spend time with nature. I believe she could have completely healed her Bipolar disorder, stopped all medication, and found her true self. As it stands now, Lithium gives her enough to maintain the status quo of a sick mind in the sick society in which it floats.
If the question was to take Lithium or die, then her choice in taking Lithium to me represents that she does not have a sufficiently spiritual relationship with death. Potentially she would not have died if she stopped Lithium she may have pushed further to a rock bottom where she could have found proper transformation and change. Instead her fear of death has left her in limbo where she remains, a little girl continually searching for a big daddy scientist to save her.
