Years after her diagnosis, and by then on the faculty of Johns Hopkins, she decided to tell the story of her manic depression. It was a difficult decision, in part because “I was brought up pretty WASP-y,” she said. “You didn’t talk about your problems.” Jamison also knew that going public would mean no longer treating patients: “I felt very strongly that a patient has a right to come into your office and deal with their issues and their problems, not what they perceive to be your issues and your problems,” she said.
Her book would become a watershed.
“There were all of these science books about bipolar illness and there were memoirs by people who had written about their illness, but there was no one who had been able to stitch all of it together in the way that she did,” said the writer Andrew Solomon, whose own approach to writing about his depression, in “The Noonday Demon,” was influenced by Jamison’s. She was, he noted, “the first person who was in the field of psychiatry who wrote about her own illness and the extended depths of it.”
She also met with much rejection. When she went out on book tour, she received hundreds of letters expressing such sentiments as “May you die tomorrow,” and “Don’t have children, don’t pass along these genes,” she said.
“There are a lot of people out there who really don’t like the mentally ill,” she said. “It’s wired into many species to be keenly aware of differences.”
Still, “An Unquiet Mind” resonated for countless readers struggling with the same illness. Jamison’s niece, the writer Leslie Jamison, remembers when her aunt came to speak to her freshman class at Harvard. “She was brilliant and witty and everyone adored her, but what I remember most clearly was this man who had been cleaning the building,” she said. “He came up to her, really quickly, and said: ‘I just want to tell you that your book changed my life.’”
She added, “It still gives me chills when I think about it, that sense that, beneath her fame and acclaim, there is this really powerful impulse towards human healing.”
An “Unquiet Mind” unlocked Kay Jamison’s life as a writer. Ever since, she has drawn explicitly from her own experience. In her book “Night Falls Fast,” for instance, she writes about her own suicide attempt during a particularly bad stretch of her 20s.
