Mental Notes - Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions

HEALTH
she’s also passionate about language and
writing. These books come from a prodigious
love of words and literature and
serious, worked-over writing.”
Given her long list of accolades, it would
be easy to assume that Jamison’s disease has
scarcely hindered her. But Jamison’s accomplishments—from
earning the MacArthur
Award to an honorary degree from Brown
University to being named Time magazine’s
“Hero of Medicine” in 1997—are not the
whole story, she is quick to point out.
“My life isn’t my C.V.,” says Jamison. “My
professional accomplishments mean a huge
amount to me, but it’s scarcely the only thing
in my life. There are years lost to pain. When
I would stop my medication, I would stop living.
I would get manic and then depressed—I
wouldn’t wish a day of that on anyone.”
As the youngest child of three, Jamison spent
most of her formative years around Andrews
Air Force Base in Washington, D.C.,
where her father, Marshall, was a meteo-
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rologist and pilot. “I had a great childhood,”
she says. “I couldn’t have been any happier.
My father was in love with life and with
ideas. My mother was the best mother—if
you had to put together a mother, you
would say, ‘This was God on a good day.’”
Early on, a young Kay showed a passion
for science, receiving her first copy of Gray’s
Anatomy at 12 and touring St. Elizabeth’s,
the federal psychiatric hospital, when she
was 15. (“I found it fascinating and horrifying,”
she recalls.) “I knew I wanted a life in
science because the questions were always
interesting to me.”
By age 17, while a senior in high school,
Jamison experienced her first manic-depressive
episode. “I wasn’t sleeping very
much,” she recalls. “I was full of what I
thought were fabulous ideas, which, in fact,
were pretty terrible ones and, at the time, as
with a lot of people who get manic, I didn’t
see it as anything strange—it was pretty
much an extension of my natural personality.
Life was just too wonderful.”
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Until it wasn’t. “At some point, I
crashed,” she says. “I could scarcely get out
of bed. I had never thought about suicide
in my life, and I started thinking about
ways to kill myself.”
In the ensuing decade, Jamison managed
to convince herself that her violent mood
swings were merely an extension of her passionate
personality. It wasn’t until Jamison
was already an assistant professor of psychiatry
at UCLA in 1974, a full decade later, that
it became clear to her that she needed help.
“I was full of what
I thought were fabulous
ideas, which,
in fact, were pretty
terrible ones.”
“I [had gone] floridly, psychotically manic,”
recalls Jamison who, among other things,
went on a wild shopping spree at the height
of her mania and purchased a stuffed fox
from a taxidermist in Virginia. “Buying that
fox was absolutely characteristic of being
manic. I knew I needed it; I couldn’t wait,
and it took on a cosmic significance for me.”
By the time the fox arrived at her office,
Jamison had long forgotten about her
purchase. “I was sitting in my clinic one
day, and there were lots of patients in the
waiting room, and one of the secretaries
said, ‘Dr. Jamison, there’s a big shipping
crate out here,’ and it was this fox, which I
had somehow felt the need to fly first class.
It was just completely ridiculous,” she says,
now able to laugh at the memory.
She began treatment with “a tremendously
good psychiatrist,” she says. But even with
excellent care, Jamison attempted suicide in
1976 after going off of her lithium, a mood
stabilizer often used to control mania. “I
think about it all the time,” she says quietly. “I
think about the people who haven’t survived.”
Having been to the brink and back, these
days, she has made it her mission to advocate
and educate, particularly on college campuses
across the country.
“The major age of onset for mood
disorders is late teens, early 20s,” says
Jamison, who also sits on the advisory
board of the National Network of
Depression Centers, a mental-health
network working to transform the field
of depressive illness and related mood
disorders. “It’s a hard disease, but it’s
a common disease. People consistently
underestimate how serious these illnesses
are. They also don’t understand
how treatable they are.”
While Jamison chose to come clean,
she advises others to think it through
before coming forward. “You don’t know
what the consequences are going to be,”
she says. “In many instances, people find
it has a freeing effect, but you don’t know
how people are going to take it. I’ve had
incredible support from my colleagues
and friends, but there were also people
who have said wicked things—there’s
a lot of animosity out there. It’s not
simple; it’s not straightforward.”
And yet, thanks to her breaking the
silence, she is widely credited with helping
to lift the stigma often associated
with mental illness. “That she has been
so accomplished has got to challenge
people’s assumptions about bipolar disorder,”
says Karen Swartz.
Despite her severe illness, Jamison
is undaunted. “I’ve had a great life and
would have no cause to complain at all,”
says Jamison. “One of the things my
mother believed is that you absolutely
have to play the hand you’ve been dealt
and not sit around wishing your cards
were different. In life, you are dealt high
cards and low cards, but it’s really about
how you put them on the table and use
them to help other people.”
JANE MARION is a senior contributing
writer for Baltimore.
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