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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in An Unquiet Mind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Madness
Love as Medicine
Stigma and Society
Authenticity in the Professional World
Summary
Analysis
In a brief prologue, Kay Redfield Jamison describes running around the parking lot of the UCLA Medical Center at two in the morning during her residency at the hospital. A colleague who at first eagerly joined her in running back and forth now sat on the curb, watching the “boundless, restless, manic” Kay sprint around the lot. When a police officer pulled up and asked what the two of them were doing, Kay’s colleague told him they were both on the faculty of the UCLA psychiatry department. The officer left without further questioning. “Being professors of psychiatry,” Jamison writes now, “explained everything.”
Kay Redfield Jamison chooses to open her memoir with this anecdote in order to illustrate how psychiatrists and other mental health professionals are regarded as experts and authorities. Even in a situation where she is clearly behaving abnormally, invoking her medical expertise dismisses the officer’s concerns. This first scene also sets up how her own experience with mental illness as both a sufferer and a medical practitioner undermines the notion that expertise alone can fix mental illness: the illness or mood disorder, not the doctor, is often in control.
Themes
In 1974, Kay Redfield Jamison had just signed a contract to become an assistant professor of psychiatry at UCLA—she was twenty-eight and “well on [her] way to madness.” Although she had, all her life, been “beholden to moods,” the mania Kay experienced in her first few months as a faculty member was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. She’d become a professor in order to try to understand her own condition. Her life, she writes now, has been a long journey to transform the manic-depressive illness that has been a part of her since her youth into something she can understand and conquer.
In this passage, Jamison encapsulates all she hopes to explore in the pages of her memoir: her struggle with mental illness, her desire to understand her own condition by dedicating her life to the study of the mind, and her fight to accept and love herself not just in spite of but because of her life’s challenges and differences.
Themes
Jamison waged “war” against herself for years by refusing to take the medications that would level out her recurrent manias. Many patients have the same struggle, and stigma, lack of information, and fear all contribute to patients feeling too scared or ashamed to seek treatment that would help them. Jamison counts herself among the lucky survivors of manic-depressive illness. She states that she has pledged to dedicate her life and career to helping others understand the disorder by weaving her own experiences together with her understanding of science, psychiatry, and biology.
Jamison also wants to use her memoir to explore the role that stigma against mental illness plays in the perpetuation of shame, self-sabotage, and even suicide in mentally ill individuals. She knows that the only way to do this is to speak up about her own experiences—by being transparent, she hopes and believes that she can make a difference in how others perceive manic-depressive illness and its sufferers.
Themes
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Jamison writes that she has long been nervous about writing a book which “so explicitly” delves into her experiences with mania, depression, and psychosis—but she knows that “whatever the consequences” may be in her personal and professional lives, it will be better than remaining silent. She no longer wants to hide behind her degrees and titles. She wants to go public about her struggles with manic-depressive illness, and, in the words of the poet Robert Lowell, “say what happened.”
This passage makes clear that Jamison is ready to surrender her hesitations about blurring the lines between the personal and the professional. She knows that she must have courage if she is to help educate others by telling her own stories.
Themes
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