A mom that took care of the mundane stuff like laundry and bills. He would suggest - "I really need your company. A lovely example of a psychiatrist friend whose granite belief that hers was a life worth living and who would be there asking for her company and not make her feel like she was too huge a burden on him. She touches on the importance of acceptance from people who love her:ġ. Her insights into her own experiences help her to draw up a clear arrangement (now called Advanced Medical Directive) with a psychiatrist and her family that if she again became severely depressed they have the authority to approve against her will if necessary both ECT (excellent treatment for certain types of depression) and hospitalisation.
Kay talks of how the resistance to treatment by patients with manic-depressive illness costs lives - "there was simply nothing that medicine or psychology could bring to bear that would make him take his medication long enough to stay well." The hard side effects, missing the highs - "of course I am strong enough - I ought to be able to carry on without drugs"
She documents the challenges of adhering to medication protocol especially when feeling better. So she has to give up sports - Squash, horse riding she felt she was giving up a part of herselfĪs a trained doctor, she is very conscious of her reluctance to edication - "I ought to be able to handle whatever difficulties came my way without having to rely upon crutches such as Medication". She does talk of how Lithium threw off coordination. And eventually learns to accept lithium in her life, even creating rules of acceptance with a sense of humour.
She explains at length the challenges of lithium - the effect of lithium in the early days, the lithium toxicity, but also missing the highs of mania, especially mildly mania phase - controlled by lithium, hating the ‘normal’, how her sister raged against her need for lithium. Kay Redfield Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, a leading expert on bipolar disorder writes a brilliantly vivid and honest memoir with very detailed descriptions of her phases, especially the mania phases. The memoir 'An Unquiet Mind' is a must read if you want to insights into Bipolar Disorder from the perspective of a person living with it or Manic Depression as Kay Jamison prefers to call it.
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