An Unquiet Mind ★★★☆☆

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Click Here To Buy)

★★★☆☆

An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison is a nonfiction book about a psychologist living with manic depressive disorder.

I checked this book out from the library and listened to the audiobook.

​Jamison is a well-known psychologist and has written several important textbooks and articles on bipolar disorder and suicide. She also struggles with bipolar herself and writes about it in this too-short memoir. Jamison discusses her childhood with her father who seemed to have his own mood swings as well as her first bouts of mania. From running around in a parking lot in the middle of the night to being put on suicide watch, Jamison briefly touches on her experience of mental illness. Between these times, she mentions getting her doctorate and the few times that she has fallen in love. Jamison accurately depicts why people experiencing mania feel like they don't need medication and how she raised her insight and remained on lithium, the medication which has worked best for her. Even with her mental illness under control, Jamison discusses the struggle to tell people that she works with that she has a mental illness, worrying about the stigma and direct repercussions associated with it. This is still an issue in the workplace today that needs to be addressed.

As a mental health professional, I have read several memoirs about mental illness and this is not the best one out there, in my opinion. Not to discredit Jamison's experience in the slightest, my issue was more that her experience felt very glossed over, not going deeper than surface level. It is considered a classic work, due to Jamison's notoriety, and that was why I decided to give it a go.

If you liked An Unquiet Mind, I also recommend Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker, Cracked, Not Broken by Kevin Hines, Ten Days in a Mad House by Nellie Bly, and Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber

Happy reading -

Ms.Bjork