The possibility of a bad job, why is this so mentally castrating? Why does my brain craft life as a black odyssey? My brain looks for the nearest stressor and capitalizes on the opportunity to generate fear. Why? I recently have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Kay Redfield Jamison is a professor at John Hopkins who writes about her experiences with bipolar disorder, the challenges it has brought her and the continued battle against it. I find her willingness to share inspirational. In the new preface to her book An Unquiet Mind, Jamison comments on the realized repercussions of disclosing such information 15 years after the original publication in 1995. There is a tension between talking about her diagnosis and not talking about it, as a professor of psychiatry, the stakes are non-trivial. In the new preface she writes “Far more people than I had realized conceptualize mental illness as a spiritual flaw or shortcoming in character. Public awareness lags behind the progress in our clinical and scientific understanding of depression and bipolar illness.” This sounds like a burden, a price to be paid. However, we cannot change public awareness if we do not talk about such pain. Jamison’s impression after all these years is the pain others have experienced due to this illness, mainly stories of others who have lost someone who had committed suicide.

How self-deprecating it must be to admit that you are afflicted by bipolar disorder?

Jamison ends the preface with this, “I feel differently about An Unquiet Mind. I have the occasional regret about having written it, certainly. But if, along with the writings and work of so many others, it has moved the understanding of mental illness a bit further into the light, then I am very glad that I made public my private experience of madness.”

JLS

References

Jamison, K. R. An Unquiet Mind : A Memoir of Moods and Madness. 2011. Random House. New York.