An Unquiet Mind

by

Kay Redfield Jamison

Kay Redfield Jamison Character Analysis

The narrator and main character of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison is a writer, psychiatrist, and researcher. Her work on mood disorders—specifically manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder, which she has lived with since her late teens—has brought her international recognition. An Unquiet Mind provides an account of Jamison’s life—a life tinged by mercurial and sometimes violent shifts in mood, the result of manic-depressive illness inherited from her father. Drawn to psychiatry as a way of understanding her own internal struggles, Jamison spends much of her memoir chronicling her time at the psychiatry department of UCLA, where she earned an undergraduate degree and, later, a doctorate, before securing a tenured professorship and a clinical appointment at the hospital. Even as Kay advanced in the professional world, she remained dogged by alternating cycles of violent manias, bleak, stultifying depressions, and the side effects of the powerful mood-stabilizing drug lithium. As Kay charts her descent into psychosis and describes a suicide attempt in the late 1970s, she uses her personal story to illuminate the work of her professional life: understanding mood disorders and the people who live with them. As the memoir unfolds, Kay wrestles with the shame and stigma of mental illness, and the ways in which fears of being professionally sidelined or stripped of her medical license held her back from transparently using her own personal history in her teaching, counseling, and research. She investigates the larger societal effects of stigma against mental illness and calls for a revolution in public education, advocacy, and litigation on behalf of the mentally ill. She explores the idea of love as medicine and uses the major formative romantic relationships in her life to show how love allowed her to feel worthy and alive even in her darkest moments. In An Unquiet Mind, Jamison crafts a living document of one woman’s struggle—but she uses her personal story to elevate awareness of the issues in research, science, clinical practice, and social and legal advocacy as they relate to the destigmatizing, understanding, and treating of mood disorders and mental illnesses.

Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes in An Unquiet Mind

The An Unquiet Mind quotes below are all either spoken by Kay Redfield Jamison or refer to Kay Redfield Jamison. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Madness Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, […] and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it also has been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 4-5
Explanation and Analysis:

The war that I waged against myself is not an uncommon one. The major clinical problem in treating manic-depressive illness is not that there are not effective medications—there are—but that patients so often refuse to take them. Worse yet, because of a lack of information, poor medical advice, stigma, or fear of personal and professional reprisals, they do not seek treatment at all.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

[The professor] was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre end original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Psychology Professor
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Related Symbols: Kay’s Horse
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget… […] Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he made no judgments about my completely irrational purchases; or, if he did, at least he didn’t make them to me. Courtesy of a personal loan he had taken out […] we were able to write checks to cover all of the outstanding bills. Slowly, over a period of many years, I was able to pay him back what I owed him. More accurate, I was able to pay back the money I owed him. I can never pay back the love, kindness, and understanding.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Brother
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

I was not only very ill when I first called for an appointment, I was also terrified and deeply embarrassed. I had never been to a psychiatrist or a psychologist before. I had no choice. I had completely, but completely, lost my mind; if I didn’t get professional help, I was quite likely to lose my job, my already precarious marriage, and my life as well.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Psychiatrist
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty and I don’t see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at is being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. […] It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Planets and the Heavens
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:

I genuinely believed […] I ought to be able to handle whatever difficulties came my way without having to rely upon crutches such as medication.

I was not the only one who felt this way. When I became ill, my sister was adamant that I should not take lithium... […] She made it clear that she thought I should “weather it through” my depressions and manias, and that my soul would wither if I chose to dampen the intensity and pain of my experiences by using medication. […] One evening, now many years ago, she tore into me for […] “lithiumizing away my feelings.”

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Sister (speaker)
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Father
Related Symbols: Kay’s Horse
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:

Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys. […] Mania is a strange and driving force, a destroyer, a fire in the blood. Fortunately, having fire in one’s blood is not without its benefits in the world of academic medicine…

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Obtaining tenure was not only a matter of academic and financial security for me. […] Tenure became a time of both possibility and transformation; it also became a symbol of the stability I craved and the ultimate recognition I sought for having competed and survived in the normal world.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 125
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

There a time when I honestly believed that there was only a certain amount of pain one had to go through in life. Because manic-depressive illness had brought such misery and uncertainty in its wake, I presumed life should therefore be kinder to me in other, more balancing ways. But then I also had believed that I could fly through starfields and slide along the rings of Saturn.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Planets and the Heavens
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. […] But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s First Husband, David Laurie, The Englishman, Richard Wyatt
Page Number: 174-175
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

The question also arises whether, ultimately, the destigmatization of mental illness comes about from merely a change in the language or, instead, from aggressive publication efforts; from successful treatments [which] somehow also catch the imagination of the public and media [or] […] from discovery of the underlying genetic or other biological causes of mental illness; […] or from legislative actions, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act… […] Attitudes about mental illness are changing, however glacially, and it is in large measure due to a combination of [all] these things.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Talking with Mogens was extremely helpful, in part because he aggressively encouraged me to use my own experiences in my research, writing, and teaching, and in part because it was very important to me to be able to talk with a senior professor who not only had some knowledge of what I had been through, but who had used his own experiences to make a profound difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Including my own.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Mogens Schou
Page Number: 189-190
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

It was not without a sense of dread that I waited for [my chairman’s] response to my telling him that I was being treated for manic-depressive illness, and that I needed to discuss the issue of my hospital privileges with him. I watched his face for some indication of how he felt. Suddenly, he reached across the table, put his hand on mine, and smiled. “Kay, dear,” he said, “l know you have manic- depressive illness.” He paused, and then laughed. “If we got rid of all of the manic-depressives on the medical school faculty, not only would we have a much smaller faculty, it would also be a far more boring one.”

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Chairman
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. […] It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; […] seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:

Even when I have been most psychotic—delusional, hallucinating, frenzied—I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful and took my breath away…. […] Some of them were grotesque and ugly and I never wanted to know they were there or to see them again. But, always, there were those new corners and—when feeling my normal self, beholden for that self to medicine and love—I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of those limitless corners, with their limitless views.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:
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Kay Redfield Jamison Quotes in An Unquiet Mind

The An Unquiet Mind quotes below are all either spoken by Kay Redfield Jamison or refer to Kay Redfield Jamison. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Madness Theme Icon
).
Prologue Quotes

Intensely emotional as a child, mercurial as a young girl, […] and then unrelentingly caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual inclination, a student of moods. It has been the only way I know to understand, indeed to accept, the illness I have; it also has been the only way I know to try and make a difference in the lives of others who also suffer from mood disorders.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 4-5
Explanation and Analysis:

The war that I waged against myself is not an uncommon one. The major clinical problem in treating manic-depressive illness is not that there are not effective medications—there are—but that patients so often refuse to take them. Worse yet, because of a lack of information, poor medical advice, stigma, or fear of personal and professional reprisals, they do not seek treatment at all.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

[The professor] was kind enough to call creative that which some, no doubt, would have called psychotic. It was my first lesson in appreciating the complicated, permeable boundaries between bizarre end original thought, and I remain deeply indebted to him for the intellectual tolerance that cast a positive rather than pathological hue over what I had written.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Psychology Professor
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. Not just any horse, but an unrelentingly stubborn and blindingly neurotic one, a sort of equine Woody Allen, but without the entertainment value.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Related Symbols: Kay’s Horse
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget… […] Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 68
Explanation and Analysis:

Now he made no judgments about my completely irrational purchases; or, if he did, at least he didn’t make them to me. Courtesy of a personal loan he had taken out […] we were able to write checks to cover all of the outstanding bills. Slowly, over a period of many years, I was able to pay him back what I owed him. More accurate, I was able to pay back the money I owed him. I can never pay back the love, kindness, and understanding.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Brother
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

I was not only very ill when I first called for an appointment, I was also terrified and deeply embarrassed. I had never been to a psychiatrist or a psychologist before. I had no choice. I had completely, but completely, lost my mind; if I didn’t get professional help, I was quite likely to lose my job, my already precarious marriage, and my life as well.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Psychiatrist
Page Number: 84
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Long since that extended voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty and I don’t see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at is being so far away from me, so unobtainable in so many ways. The intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind’s flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. […] It was difficult to give up the high flights of mind and mood, even though the depressions that inevitably followed nearly cost me my life.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Planets and the Heavens
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:

I genuinely believed […] I ought to be able to handle whatever difficulties came my way without having to rely upon crutches such as medication.

I was not the only one who felt this way. When I became ill, my sister was adamant that I should not take lithium... […] She made it clear that she thought I should “weather it through” my depressions and manias, and that my soul would wither if I chose to dampen the intensity and pain of my experiences by using medication. […] One evening, now many years ago, she tore into me for […] “lithiumizing away my feelings.”

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Sister (speaker)
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

The complexities of what we are given in life are vast and beyond comprehension. It was as if my father had given me, by way of temperament, an impossibly wild, dark, and unbroken horse. It was a horse without a name, and a horse with no experience of a bit between its teeth.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Father
Related Symbols: Kay’s Horse
Page Number: 119
Explanation and Analysis:

Manic-depression is a disease that both kills and gives life. Fire, by its nature, both creates and destroys. […] Mania is a strange and driving force, a destroyer, a fire in the blood. Fortunately, having fire in one’s blood is not without its benefits in the world of academic medicine…

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Obtaining tenure was not only a matter of academic and financial security for me. […] Tenure became a time of both possibility and transformation; it also became a symbol of the stability I craved and the ultimate recognition I sought for having competed and survived in the normal world.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 125
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

There a time when I honestly believed that there was only a certain amount of pain one had to go through in life. Because manic-depressive illness had brought such misery and uncertainty in its wake, I presumed life should therefore be kinder to me in other, more balancing ways. But then I also had believed that I could fly through starfields and slide along the rings of Saturn.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Planets and the Heavens
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods. […] But if love is not the cure, it certainly can act as a very strong medicine.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s First Husband, David Laurie, The Englishman, Richard Wyatt
Page Number: 174-175
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

The question also arises whether, ultimately, the destigmatization of mental illness comes about from merely a change in the language or, instead, from aggressive publication efforts; from successful treatments [which] somehow also catch the imagination of the public and media [or] […] from discovery of the underlying genetic or other biological causes of mental illness; […] or from legislative actions, such as the Americans with Disabilities Act… […] Attitudes about mental illness are changing, however glacially, and it is in large measure due to a combination of [all] these things.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 183
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

Talking with Mogens was extremely helpful, in part because he aggressively encouraged me to use my own experiences in my research, writing, and teaching, and in part because it was very important to me to be able to talk with a senior professor who not only had some knowledge of what I had been through, but who had used his own experiences to make a profound difference in the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. Including my own.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Mogens Schou
Page Number: 189-190
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

It was not without a sense of dread that I waited for [my chairman’s] response to my telling him that I was being treated for manic-depressive illness, and that I needed to discuss the issue of my hospital privileges with him. I watched his face for some indication of how he felt. Suddenly, he reached across the table, put his hand on mine, and smiled. “Kay, dear,” he said, “l know you have manic- depressive illness.” He paused, and then laughed. “If we got rid of all of the manic-depressives on the medical school faculty, not only would we have a much smaller faculty, it would also be a far more boring one.”

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker), Kay’s Chairman
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. […] It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one’s life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one’s loves and friendships.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 215
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; […] seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:

Even when I have been most psychotic—delusional, hallucinating, frenzied—I have been aware of finding new corners in my mind and heart. Some of those corners were incredible and beautiful and took my breath away…. […] Some of them were grotesque and ugly and I never wanted to know they were there or to see them again. But, always, there were those new corners and—when feeling my normal self, beholden for that self to medicine and love—I cannot imagine becoming jaded to life, because I know of those limitless corners, with their limitless views.

Related Characters: Kay Redfield Jamison (speaker)
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis: