Love as Medicine Theme Analysis

Kay Redfield Jamison is adamant about the fact that, without the mood-stabilizing drug lithium, she would likely not have survived the debilitating waves of mania and depression brought on by her bipolar disorder (which she calls manic-depressive illness). By the same token, however, Jamison admits that medicine is not the only reason she has been able to survive in the face of her illness: “love as sustainer, as renewer, and as protector,” she argues, is what has allowed her to battle against the stigma and pain of mental illness. Over the course of An Unquiet Mind, Jamison never undercuts the importance of medicine in the management of mental illness—but she ultimately suggests that love is its own kind of medicine, one with the power to “shut out the terror and awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality.”

“No amount of love can cure madness or unblacken one’s dark moods,” Jamison writes in An Unquiet Mind—and yet the author uses her memoir to explore her faith in the idea of love as a healing force. As Jamison cycles through memory, she points to recollections of romantic relationships to explain how her experiences with love have helped to mitigate her experience of manic-depressive illness’s debilitating effects. Jamison focuses on several important relationships in her life in order to demonstrate the ways in which the feeling of being in love with another person—and being loved deeply in return—helped her to survive.

Jamison’s marriage to the unnamed French artist who was her first husband is the first major romantic relationship the book explores. Kay describes the marriage as one bolstered by passion—she was, she says “painfully intense” at the time, while her husband was steadier and calmer. Their marriage, she says, allowed her to feel she lived in a “reasonably quiet and harbored world.” As Jamison’s illness worsened, however, she found herself “increasingly restless” and she longed to rebel against the stability her marriage provided; she separated from her husband under the guise of wanting children when he did not, moved into a brand-new apartment, and, in a fit of mania, filled it with furniture she hated. Jamison’s first marriage sets up the idea of love as medicine—but also informs her readers that love is not a cure or a fix for the very real threats mental illness represents. Though Jamison’s first marriage allowed her to feel a sense of calm in the midst of her rocky early adulthood, it did not provide an alternative to the very real help she needed (and denied herself) by not taking her lithium regularly or admitting to any of her colleagues that she needed help and understanding. The rocky ending to Jamison’s first marriage culminated in her succumbing to a manic episode in which she purchased tons of ugly furniture, demonstrating that without the dual help of “love medicine” and chemical medication, Jamison was adrift on the seas of her illness.

David Laurie is the second of Kay Redfield Jamison’s major romantic partners featured in the book. Jamison describes meeting David in 1975 during her first year on the faculty at UCLA—not very long after her suicide attempt. David was a psychiatrist with the British Royal Army Medical Corps, and the two bonded over their shared interests in music, poetry, and psychiatry. David allowed Jamison to see life, she writes, in its best possible spirit—but after a short time together, David died suddenly of a heart attack. His death shocked and saddened Jamison, but the loss did not “plunge [her] into unendurable darkness” or trigger another suicide attempt—in fact, Jamison found herself comforted by memories of David and able to allow time to “bring [her] relief” over the course of the next several years. Jamison’s relationship with David demonstrated to her that even after hitting rock bottom, attempting suicide, and risking her life, her professional stability, and her sense of self, she was still worthy of love and happiness. David’s death, though tragic, enabled Jamison to see how far she’d come in her own recovery; David’s love was not what stabilized her, but the foundation it provided did allow her to survive his death without plunging herself into the lows she’d faced before.

Richard Wyatt is Jamison’s second husband, a schizophrenia researcher with whom Jamison shared a “short but very convincing courtship.” Jamison quickly moved from California to Washington to marry and make a life with Richard, and she found herself grounded and stabilized by him in spite of their very different personalities. Where Jamison was intense and quick to anger, Richard was low-key and laid-back. Though Jamison writes that Richard initially struggled to handle her “mercurial moods,” his pragmatism, steady love, and common intellectual interests made their relationship a “safe harbor.” Jamison’s language in describing her relationship with Richard echoes the language she uses to describe her first marriage: both are “harbors” of sorts, which help her to feel moored not just to the world, but also to her sense of self. Richard’s love and understanding are not the “cure[s]” to Jamison’s manic spells or depressive episodes—but they are a kind of “very strong medicine.”

Jamison never argues that sex, romance, or even self-love are cures for mental illness or substitutes for the medical treatment that many mental illnesses often require—but she does use An Unquiet Mind to suggest that feeling (and giving) love, acceptance, and trust from and to one’s family, friends, and romantic partners can help ease the pain of such illnesses. Jamison enumerates her many experiences with different kinds of love in order to show how feelings of infatuation, companionship, and steady devotion have made her feel worthy and whole. As such, she argues that for those struggling with mental illness, the need to feel and be loved (and to give that love back to others) is important in managing the long-term effects of the many debilitating disorders that can affect the brain.