An Unquiet Mind

Jamison grew up in a military family, as her father was an Air Force officer, pilot, and meteorologist, and “first and foremost a scientist and only secondarily a pilot” (11). When she would tell her father that the Army was much older and had much more tradition, her father would reply that the Air Force was the future and could fly (11-12).

An early event stuck with the author as she grew older. When she was very young, while her father was at Andrews Air Force Base, she witnessed a plane crash while she and her friends were playing at the playground. It was later revealed that the pilot could have saved himself by evacuating the plane, but by doing so would risk killing the children in the playground, so he chose to save the children instead. “The dead pilot became a hero,” she writes, “transformed into a scorchingly vivid, completely impossible ideal for what was meant by the concept of duty […] all the more compelling and haunting because of its very unobtainability” (13).

Jamison moved around a lot growing up, living all over both the country and the world, although her parents tried to make sure they grew up comfortably and stably. She had an older brother and sister, though she was closer with her older brother, whom she “idolized,” and who was “smart, fair, and self-confident” (13). Her older sister, on the other hand, had “little tolerance for the conservative military lifestyle that she filed imprisoned” them and was consequentially more rebellious and distant, resenting her siblings because everything seemed to come easy to them (14). (Jamison herself appreciated much of the tradition and elegance, but disliked the arbitrary rules and the subtle—or often overt—sexism of the military world.) Her father “was often magically involved: ebullient, funny, curious about almost everything, and able to describe with delight and originality the beauties and phenomena of the natural world” (15), given to spontaneous passions and interests which he thrust upon his children, as well, “rather like having Mary Poppins for a father” (17). Her mother was someone with whom people always wanted to talk; she had “a tremendous capacity for friendship and a remarkable ability to put people at their ease,” more a socialite than an intellectual, “incapable of being unkind” (18).

Her parents were highly encouraging of her pursuits, whatever that might have been, from poetry to science: “Even my phases […] were for the most part tolerated with kindness and imagination” (19). When she became interested in medicine, despite the time period, “an era that breathed, If woman be a nurse,” she was encouraged and even introduced to doctors at the base, who “took [her] on rounds with them and let [her] observe and even assist at minor surgical procedures” (21).

At fifteen, she went on a trip to a federal psychiatric hospital, St. Elizabeths; she and the other “volunteer nurses,” known as candy stripers, were nervous, and she recalls the childhood taunt of “You’ll end up in St. Elizabeths” being the one thing that “began to poke away at [her] mind” regarding her own sanity (22). She was surprised to discover that the hospital grounds suggested to her that it “was not at all the grim place” she thought it would be; however, upon entering, “There was, immediately, the dreadful reality of the sights and sounds and smells of insanity” (23). She noticed that there were far fewer nurses on staff and wondered how one attendant could possibly control 90 patients. At one point she spoke to one of the patients and asked why she was in the hospital. The patient gave her a bizarre response dealing with different colored balls in her mind; while “fascinated,” Jamison “was primarily frightened by the strangeness of the patients, as well as by the perceptible level of terror in the room” and “the expressions of pain in the eyes of the women” (25).

In 1961, at 15, the author’s father retired from the military, taking a job at the Rand Corporation in California. Despite her sometimes mistrust of military institutions, she felt out of place at the much more lax “civilian school.” She found herself missing the “small, warm, unthreatening, and cloistered world” of a military youth and found California to be, comparatively, “rather cold and flashy” (31). Moreover, she went from being a big fish in a small pond to a small fish in a big pond, as she found both athletics and academics to be much more competitive than she was accustomed to. While this was “humiliating” and “very discouraging,” it also provided her with a fascinating extracurricular education (32).

At the same time that her personal life changed immensely, her family life began to become troubled, as well: her brother was away at college, her relationship with her sister was nearly nonexistent, and her parents, “although still living together, were essentially estranged” (34). Her father’s mood swings became more severe through this period: his idiosyncratic passions tested the patience of his new employer, while “the blackness of his depressions filled the air as pervasively as music did in his better periods” (34). He began drinking, and as his depressions became more severe, she grew fearful of him.

It was around this time that her own mood swings became more noticeable: “By the time I was sixteen or seventeen, it became clear that my energies and enthusiasms could be exhausting to the people around me, and after long weeks of flying high and sleeping little, my thinking would take a downward turn” (35). Her first true bout of manic-depressive illness came in her senior year, and it was shocking to her: “I was used to my mind being my best friend […] Now, all of a sudden, my mind had turned on me: it mocked me for my vapid enthusiasms; it laughed at all of my foolish plans; it no longer found anything interesting or enjoyable or worthwhile” (37-8). She was able “to pass as normal in school,” which she attributes to the fact that “people are generally caught up in their own lives and seldom notice despair in others” (39). Nevertheless, she completed high school and moved on. 

At 18, Jamison began her studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; she had wanted to go to the University of Chicago, but her father had lost his job at Rand at that point, making private school tuition out of reach for her. In the long run, however, she came to believe UCLA was the best place for her.

College was a struggle for Jamison, as her mood swings became more and more severe. Her manic periods were periods “of great fun, passion, high enthusiasms, and long runs of very hard but enjoyable work” (42); as it did in high school, her moods would eventually “crash, and [her] mind again would grind to a halt” (44). However, it didn’t occur to her that she might be ill until one of her abnormal psychology lectures; nevertheless, she did not seek help, and her depression eventually subsided, “but only long enough for it to regroup and mobilize for the next attack” (45).

One day, during an upper-level course in personality theory, the professor asked the students to write down their responses to different Rorschach cards; in the midst of a mania, Jamison filled her own notebook with lengthy, bizarre responses. The professor asked “the person who had written” those responses to remain after class, where he praised her for her imaginative responses and asked if she would be interested in a lab assistant position he had open. “It was a wonderful experience” for Jamison; she “immersed [herself] in the work and found it not only a source of education and income, but escape as well,” far preferable to her retail job and her coursework, the latter of which “was riddled with failing grades and incompleted classes” due to her fluctuating moods (47-48).

At 20, she was awarded a federal grant which allowed her to study abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she had “a year of science by day, and music and poetry by night” (48). She chose to study zoology despite knowing little about the field; as a result, she was continually behind her classmates. Nonetheless, her time in Scotland “remains a haunting and lovely time […] an amulet against all manner of longing and loss, a year of gravely held but joyous remembrances” (52).

After a year, she returned to UCLA and resumed balancing “work, classes, social life, and disruptive moods” (52-53). Due to her mood swings, she felt that medical school would be difficult and decided to shift her focus to psychology. She had recently begun working on research with another professor studying mood-altering drugs; as it happened, this professor likewise experienced mood swings and was very understanding of hers as a result. Despite their subject of study, however, they were both skeptical of taking antidepressants themselves, which “was a costly attitude” (54).

In 1971, Jamison began her doctoral studies, also at UCLA. She decided to do something about her 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 […] I naturally bought a horse” (55). Although the manic nature of the horse matched her own moods rather well, it proved to be an expensive decision, and she eventually “sold [her] horse […] and started showing up for [her] classes at UCLA” (56).

Jamison preferred graduate school to undergraduate school, since “as long as one ultimately performed, the erratic ways that one took to get there were considerably less important,” a leniency which suited her temperament well (57). During this time, she also met her first husband, a French artist “who was, for a switch, essentially apolitical, highly intelligent but unintellectual, and deeply committed to the arts. [They] were very different, but [they] liked one another immediately” (57). She also chose to focus on clinical psychology, which she found to be both fascinating and demanding, yet she still struggled to connect what she knew academically with her own experiences: “I blithely went on with my clinical training and never put my mood swings into any medical context whatsoever” (58-59).

However, she also viewed with some suspicion the clinical assessments of her professors; in one striking example, after administering a series of tests to her husband as practice, Jamison found the responses to be humorous, playful, and creative, whereas her supervisor wished to label him a sociopath. She was fascinated by what she could learn from her patients and by her various side passions, but felt uneasy with the more rigorous academic aspects. Finally, she “conducted a completely uninspired doctoral study about heroin addiction and wrote a correspondingly uninspired dissertation based upon it” (61), passed her exam, and joined the UCLA Department of Psychiatry as an assistant professor.