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Beautifully written memoir, published in 1995, of a wildly intelligent and successful John Hopkins psychologist who has bipolar disorder. I took two things away from it:One- so much has been learned about the disorder since 1995.Two – I feel like I understand my mother’s illness better after reading this, but not my son’s.I understand my manic depressive mother better since I didn’t realize that lithium wasn’t approved for general use until the early 1970’s. That explains so much about my childh...
I really enjoyed this book. It’s incredibly well written. The author: She’s truly brilliant. She comes across as completely honest and she allows herself to be vulnerable in the telling of her story, which makes her exceedingly likeable. Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist, a professor of psychiatry and an authority on bipolar disorder, and suffers from the condition herself. And she’s written a terrific book about bipolar disorder and her life experience. And no, I’m not using too much hyper...
A lot of people seem to have a negative reaction to this book, which I totally get. I didn't find Jamison a particularly likable person, and this wasn't great literature, though it did go down fast and smooth.Be that as it may, I've strongly recommended An Unquiet Mind several times, and I can't judge it by the normal standards that I apply to most books. I see An Unquiet Mind as performing a specific and vital function, at which I think it succeeds extremely well: that is, Jamison's memoir does...
A brilliant poetic autobiography of one of the world’s top researchers into bipolar disorder, who also is a fellow sufferer. The author risked her career by publishing this brave, beautiful memoir. As elegant as any work of literary fiction and inspiring to the many who cope with mental illness. I have read it many times, to savor the language and hopeful message. Most highly recommended!
An autobiography of a brilliant woman who suffered from manic depression (she resists the more watered down label "bipolar" because she thinks it hides the essential nature of the disease.) She made it through a PhD in psychology and became one of the foremost authorities in her field before finally getting the consistent treatment she needed. Just seeing how she was able to achieve such professional success while privately dealing with such hellish, frightening moments of near insanity is enoug...
“I am tired of hiding, tired of misspent and knotted energies, tired of the hypocrisy, and tired of acting as though I have something to hide.” An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness is an honest and profoundly dramatic memoir that reveals the challenges and sufferings faced by people that suffer from bipolar disorder. Kay Redfield Jamison herself endured the dangerous highs of euphoria mixed with the lows of depression. Her professional success as a clinical psychologist coupled with
“If you have bipolar illness, this book will help you to forgive yourself for everything that has gone awry; if you do not, it will perhaps show how a steely tenacity can imbue disasters with value, a capacity that stands to enrich any and every life.”
I read An Unquiet Mind because I wanted to learn more about bipolar disorder. I remember all the attention this book received when it first came out, and it was recommended to me by more than one person, so I was somewhat baffled by how little I enjoyed reading it. Don't get me wrong--I wasn't expecting a memoir about bipolar disorder to be some kind of party. But I think I may have read too many beautiful memoirs by poets and novelists to be particularly impressed by the workmanlike writing in
I'm still not quite sure what I think of this book. It was recommended to me by a therapist thinking I would be interested as someone with bipolar disorder. Due to the source of the suggestion and the author of the book, an expert on and individual with bipolar disorder, I expected some practical insight into living with this disease. What I found was much different.This book is labeled a memoir, and the writing style and content certainly fit the label. Unfortunately, the author seemed to try t...
Highly recommended if you are curious about Manic-depressive disease. A fascinating and even very well written insight from a woman who is both a Psychiatrist who treats it and suffers from it. She was very brave and very poetic in writing this book.
This was overrated. I learned very little about what it's like to actually have manic-depression; Dr. Jamison preferred to write about her love life and her visits to England. She glossed over her suicide attempt and the only description of hospitalization is that of one of her patients. Also, the memoir skips back and forth in time and it's irritating. There are better books out there.
So far... about half way done...1 star for her vanity and pretension 5 stars because of the taxidermic fox3 stars being a calculated average**UPDATE**Perhaps I have been corrupted by the reviews I read before finishing this book; however, I am still trying to wash Kay Redfield Jamison’s self-haughtiness out of my mind. I think that the first chapter and the last chapter are the only ones with any weight. Chapter one is about Jamison’s childhood and more specifically, her manic father. The second...
‘I worked on a locked ward at the time, and I didn’t relish the idea of not having the key.’ The author suffers from manic depressive illness (who chooses this coin of phrase as opposed to bipolar disorder, and I tend to agree with her). She is a brilliant mind, an academic and health care professional and absolute authority on this subject; she lives and breathes the disease but is able to treat her patients with complete and utter understanding and of course, empathy. This is Kay’s memoir,
This is a deeply personal book to me and one that I recommend to everyone who is bipolar or who has friends or loved ones who are bipolar. It's a fascinating read even if you're just interested in psychopathology. Dr. Jamison has Type I Bipolar Disorder, its onset occurred during her childhood, and she has struggled with and benefitted from its effects throughout her life (manic episodes are often euphoric periods during which one's energy feels boundless, one feels capable of enormous feats, in...
Just ran across this review of "An Unquiet Mind" that I wrote a couple of years ago (January 2009). As I go back through blog posts, Twitter feeds, book reviews, etc., it amazes me how difficult a time *I* was having... and how I was paying NO attention to that whatsoever. It was all about someone else. And really, in this book, that's how Jamison seems to think it should be.I just had the opportunity to re-read this book when it was offered on the Kindle, and I was surprised. I seemed to rememb...
In her bold autobiography An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison details her struggle with bipolar disorder in the midst of her career as a clinical psychologist. First published in 1994, this book highlights Jamison's bravery: with such a prestigious academic position and a CV full of work related to manic-depressive disorder, she risked her reputation and her ethos by writing this wonderful, heart-wrenching volume.The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it be...
Think of this book as an autobiography and you can't go wrong. Kay Redfield Jamison hardly needs an introduction here; her life and work stand for themselves. She literally 'wrote the book' on bipolar disorder with co-author Fred Goodwin, M.D. called, simply enough, "Manic-Depressive Illness." So this book, "An Unquiet Mind," is not a clinical study of bipolar disorder. It is a deep and personal inside look at what it's like to live with manic depression from the unique viewpoint of a brilliant
i was reading some reviews of the book written by people that disliked this. i just want to say, that for a person suffering from mental illness, the fact that you know jamieson's full CV and her academic struggles is important. it's more of a - look, she was wildly successful, and dealing with this illness, and she finally came to terms with it, and now she's okay - and still wildly successful. i also want to say how brave it was for her to write this under her own name. it does a lot to irradi...
just re-read this for class. maybe i'll post a a review later. for now, though, i raised my four-star rating to five. the ways in which KRJ thinks about mental illness are not always congenial with mine, but this is a brave, beautifully written, and still very powerful book, many such memoirs later. REVIEW 3/12/11i'm not going to research this, but i think this was one of the first candid memoirs of mental disorder coming from someone famous/mainstream in the US and published by a major publishe...
I doubt sometimes whethera quiet & unagitated lifewould have suited me -- yet Isometimes long for it.~Byron The Chinese believe that before you can conquer a beast you first must make it beautiful. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness is a memoir about living with manic depression by Kay Redfield Jamison, who is a clinical psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Kay prefers the term manic depression to bipolar disorder beca...