An Appraisal of a Manic Depressive

What’s in a definition?

Dr. Kay Jamison is almost demure and modest to a fault. This is difficult to reconcile especially considering she was awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2002 and the Padres Humanitarian Prize in Mental Health in 2021, two prestigious awards. She has elegant light brown hair that’s usually fashioned in a bob cut. Her inner warmth exudes through her pearly white smile on occasion, but her smiling is selective. She has known tempests and has acquired a learned pragmatism. Her hazel eyes are embers: a survivor’s emblem. Her movements are deliberate, measured, and purposeful—every gesture toward the screen or to illustrate a point, even her posture. There isn’t anything superfluous or improvised in her actions. She is all planning, all intentional. “The first time I met her, she came across as quiet and reserved but at the same time incredibly open,” says Mary Beth Cogan, a colleague. “It’s unusual to meet someone, having read An Unquiet Mind where she’d laid herself bare. I felt like a knew a lot of things about her, intimate details. It was a real juxtaposition—meeting her for the first time yet knowing her so well.”

Living with mental illness weighs heavily in varying and unbearable degrees on most facets of an affected individual’s life. “When I’m sick, it’s nothing but a nightmare,” Dr. Jamison says. And then there is the stigma. People with mental illness are sometimes considered outcasts or held under heavy suspicion. “The right-wing demonization of groups of society is horrifying. I can’t believe that we’re at this point in America that we’re being unkind to people who are different,” she says, lamenting the current sociopolitical climate.

The Price of Creativity

Parallels of Mental Persecution

Homecoming

The venue was the Mason Hall Auditorium on the Johns Hopkins University’s (JHU) Homewood Campus. The grass on the lawns on either side of the footpaths connecting various buildings, no longer beholden to winter’s constrictive clasp, was lush and verdant. The air was filled with strikingly melodious chirping. Spring had sprung rather soon.

 On that unexpectedly warm evening of March 13th, 2012, Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison, a Professor of Psychiatry at the JHU School of Medicine as well as one of the foremost global authorities on mood disorders, was slated to give a presentation titled “Mood Disorders and Creativity.” The auditorium was packed. The audience was abuzz with contained excitement. Dr. Jamison was the epitome of composure and poise. Calm and confident, she looked on as she was introduced by the then University Provost Lloyd Minor and Dean Katherine Newman. Dressed in a black gown and a pearl necklace, Dr. Jamison took to the podium and proceeded to give an hour-long lecture about the link between mood disorders and creativity. This is a link she can personally attest to. An artist and prolific writer in her own right, she first revealed her diagnosis in her first memoir An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness in 1995. Dr. Jamison has bipolar disorder.

As They See Her

Dr. Jamison is an accomplished individual, hailed as a teacher (professor), writer, and public speaker. “I met Kay in 1979,” says Dr. Raymond DePaulo, a professor of psychiatry at the JHU School of Medicine and a colleague of Dr. Jamison’s. “She was at the University of California Los (UCLA) Angeles School of Medicine. We found out prior that we had each started a bipolar [disorder] program at UCLA and at Hopkins on July 1st, 1977, at the same time.” He adds, “She claims in jest that we’re twins separated at birth.” Dr. Jamison and Dr. DePaulo are co-directors of the Mood Disorders Center at the JHU School of Medicine. “The Center facilitates research in the basic sciences, neurobiology, epidemiology, genetics, and clinical studies. I play an advisory role [to the] bipolar disorder group,” says Dr. Jamison. “The Center undertakes strategic planning, looking out for grant and funding opportunities. It looks to foster relationships and collaborations,” says Cogan, who works with Dr. Jamison at the Mood Disorders Center in an administrative and advisory role. Cogan sits bright eyed in a home office, a mahogany cupboard standing against the back wall behind her, above which hangs an iridescent piece of elephant art. “There is a lot of outreach with the National Association for the Mentally Ill, as well as depression centers nationally.”

Of all her endeavors, Dr. Jamison enjoys writing particularly. “In 1987, she called me [saying] she planned to move to the east coast. She wanted to teach in our program at Hopkins,” says Dr. DePaulo. “She was close to a professorship at UCLA but didn’t want to spend time in traditional academics. She wanted to spend her time with writing and advocacy.” Dr. Jamison has authored eight books, including a textbook on bipolar disorder and two memoirs. “The book I authored on Robert Lowell is my favorite,” she says. “He was an extraordinary person, an immensely complicated man, and a great poet who struggled most of his life with a bad disease. I was able to make some sense of his character and his capacity to keep living and staying alive in circumstances where few people would.” She alludes to the fact that the talented and immensely creative Robert Lowell had bipolar disorder. The book she authored, Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania and Character was received to critical acclaim. “Her book on Lowell was a finalist for the Nobel Prize in Literature,” says Dr. Karen Swartz, a colleague and mentee of Dr. Jamison.

Robert Lowell

Champion of the. Postmodernist Movement

Robert Lowell was a critically acclaimed poet and champion of the postmodernist literary movement of the 1960s and 70s. He won the distinguished Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1947 and 1974. Born in 1917 in Boston, he is widely acknowledged as the most eminent poet since T.S. Eliot, a forebearer of the preceding modernist literary movement. The essence of postmodernism is “modernist issues regarding innovative narrative techniques taken up again and adapted in an academic, sometimes formalistic way.” Lowell was a prolific author and poet, boasting a portfolio of 21 books and poetry collections. “Lowell’s mind was of a lurching, revising originality,” Dr. Jamison wrote in her book about him.

“When I’m sick, it’s nothing but a nightmare,”

-Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison-

“The right-wing demonization of groups of society is horrifying. I can’t believe that we’re at this point in America that we’re being unkind to people who are different,

--Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison on social stigma in current America-

First Diagnosis | Jamison

Dr. Jamison was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1974 while she was a psychology resident at UCLA. In her memoir An Unquiet Mind, she records that she was “relieved to hear a diagnosis that I knew in my mind of minds to be true.” She had erupted into a manic episode whose symptoms—euphoria, rapid speech, and even psychosis—could not be concealed, prompting a psychiatrist visit. The illness has been a bane. And the medication—Lithium—took some acceptance, some protracted acceptance. “The first few years I fought it, and nearly died from a suicide attempt when I stopped taking it,” Dr. Jamison says of her struggles with Lithium compliance. “It became clear that if I didn’t take it that I would be in hospital for most of my life, or dead.” When Dr. Jamison published An Unquiet Mind, coming out in public as mentally ill, the move was unprecedented for a health professional, particularly one of her caliber and renown. “It was an enormous deal for an accomplished academic to talk about having a mental illness,” says Dr. Swartz, who first met Dr. Jamison as a third-year resident under her (Dr. Jamison’s) tutelage at the JHU School of Medicine. “[The memoir was] one of the most articulate and beautiful descriptions of [the illness] without romanticizing it.”

Lowell was diagnosed with bipolar disorder as early as 1949 and was frequently hospitalized with mania—an intensity of unbridled positive mood. Dr. Jamison writes that “Lowell’s originality and breadth of thinking were matched with prodigious energy.” He is reported to have written the bulk of his most renowned work, Life Studies, on the brink of a manic episode, days before he was hospitalized. His poem Shadow engenders this manic drive. A few select lines read thus: “I must borrow from Walt Whitman to praise this night/twice waking me smiling, mysteriously in full health/twice delicately calling me to the world/praise be to sleep and to sleep’s one god […] If I had a dream of hell/it would be packing up a house/with demons eternally asking/thought-provoking questions.” These spells of feverish energy would persist either until psychiatric medication intervened (Lowell once called himself a “thorazined fixture,” having been sedated with Thorazine), or his mood inverted and tumbled headlong into depression; into endless bleak despair that was dank, dark, and dolorous. Lowell contemplated suicide several times, although it did not become his undoing. In his poem Home, he wrote: “I cannot sit or stand two minutes/yet walk imagining a dialogue/between the devil and myself/not knowing which is which or worse/saying/as one would instinctively say Hail Mary/I wish I could die/Less than ever I expect to be alive/six months from now […].”

Lowell paid a high price for his creativity. So has Dr. Jamison.

Dr. Jamison has formed close connections with her colleagues. She is especially close with Dr. Swartz, whom she collaborates with at the Mood Disorders Center. “I’m involved with the Adult Depression Awareness Program, a community initiative,” says Dr. Swartz, a program whose origins are tied to a string of suicides by youth in Baltimore, beginning with three young people within a month in the Spring of 1997. This prompted action of dealing with suicide tied to depression. Dr. Swartz says that Dr. Jamison has been a huge help to this initiative, which has grown from communal bounds to a national program availed to high schools throughout the country. “Kay (Dr. Jamison) is really generous,” says Dr. Swartz. “I frequently drive a long distance to visit my ailing mother. She knew that I listened to audiobooks during long trips, so she got me an advanced audio copy of her Lowell book free of charge.”

Lowell regularly undertook correspondence with several contemporaries. He was particularly close with Elizabeth Bishop, who suffered from depression at times. Bishop wrote to Lowell that her symptoms “are a lot like yours, on a modest scale, I think...But you have to do everything on the grand scale!” He was married three times and was wed to Caroline Blackwood at the time of his death by heart attack in 1977.

Dr. Jamison has been married three times. She lost her second husband, Richard Wyatt, to cancer, and the grief she experienced was the subject of her second memoir Nothing was the Same. Dr. Jamison says with mirth in her voice that the most important person in her life is her husband, Dr. Thomas Traill. “He’s the most incredible person,” she says. “He’s funny, incredibly smart, strong emotionally, incredibly kind and loving to me.” Dr. Jamison says that they met at Hopkins. “He’d been asked to consult on my niece. It was nearly instant chemistry.”