An Unquiet Mind: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

When it was time to return to California, Kay “dreaded” leaving England. She had adjusted to a new kind of life in London and was afraid of what leaving would mean not just for her happiness but for her very health. Daunted by the frenetic pace and demanding work of her job at UCLA, Kay returned to California feeling full of doubts about herself—but upon returning to her old routine, she found that her time in England had been “restorative” enough to allow her to appreciate anew the hustle and bustle of faculty life.

Kay resumed work on a textbook about manic-depressive illness and found herself able to concentrate longer and make deeper insights and associations as she drew upon her own experiences with the disorder as well as the writings of artists and even her own patients. Kay hoped to describe empathetically and accurately the experience of having manic-depressive illness while maintaining a “cerebral” and academic structure for the book—the challenge excited her, and she found herself genuinely enjoying the work even when it grew daunting.

Lowering her lithium dose back in England, Jamison writes, had allowed her to “mind and emotions to sway a bit,” much like the building codes in California require structures to sway in order to prevent earthquake damage. Her experience of the world was more intense and her moods more pronounced—but the effect was a positive rather than negative one. She began to understand that she was experiencing the “evenness and predictability most people […] probably took for granted throughout their lives.”

To illustrate this new experience of the world, Jamison relays an anecdote about tutoring a blind student in statistics. She and the student had a good rapport, and as they grew closer, she felt comfortable enough to ask him questions about what it was like to go through life as a blind man—and began to feel she could understand his experience of life. One day, when she went to meet him at in the blind reading room of the library, she found herself stunned to come across a dozen students reading in the dark in silence. It was one of those moments in life, she says, in which one realizes that they have “no real comprehension of the other person’s world.” Around this time, Kay began to see herself, too, as a “stranger to the normal world.”

For Kay, even normalcy was tinged with restlessness and a “low-grade, fitful instability.” This affected the things she believed were possible for the rest of her life—she knew she’d never experience the true evenness of her colleagues’ lives and routines, and she believed that in love, too, she’d have to find a partner whose passions and volatility matched her own. The man who would become her second husband, she writes, has taught her more about “steadiness and growth” than she ever thought possible.

After meeting a man named Richard Wyatt—a schizophrenia researcher and the Chief of Neuropsychiatry at the National Institute of Mental Health—at a Christmas party in Washington D.C., Kay didn’t imagine that the quiet academic would be a match for her. However, their “short but convincing courtship” showed her how very different people with divergent temperaments and interests can sometimes be a perfect fit. Within a year of meeting Richard, Kay resigned from UCLA and moved back to Washington to be near him.

Kay had few regrets about leaving California, though departing from UCLA itself was difficult—it was the place where she’d built a life and had secured, against all odds, a tenured position she loved. Richard and Kay moved in together in Georgetown and quickly found that the differences between them were even vaster than they’d known: Kay’s intensity baffled the “low-key” Richard, while Richard’s lack of interest in art, music, and poetry came very close to actively offending Kay. Nonetheless, their love for one another was steadfast and generous, and Richard—like David—was curious, sensitive, and reassuring in regard to Kay’s manic-depressive illness.

Though Jamison writes about how she and Richard have enjoyed a long and happy partnership, there are still times when he fails to fully understand her experiences of mania or depression—and there are times when she fails to be capable of explaining to him what she’s going through. “No amount of love,” Jamison writes, “can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods”—and yet Richard’s stillness, quietness, and solidarity have allowed her to feel a sense of hope and unlikely serenity even in her worst moments. Love may not be the cure, Jamison writes—but it is without a doubt a “very strong medicine.”