An Unquiet Mind: Personal Reflections on Manic-Depressive Illness


Filed Under Personal Stories | Jul 15, MDT 12:53 pm

This is a video of Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison discussing her battle with mania and depression.  She gave this speech while on a book tour for her memoir “An Unquiet Mind“.

It’s not often that you hear a psychiatrist talk about their own struggles with a mental illness; often times, as Dr. Jamison attests to in the following video, psychiatrists can diagnose an illness, they can offer drugs for it, but they rarely understand what it feels like to have it.

I remember meeting one psychiatrist who was, to put it bluntly, incapable of empathy. This inability made her more of a menace to her patients than an instrument for their recovery. I do think that doctors who share a deeper understanding of their patients are more likely to be able to offer them real and lasting help.

Dr. Jamison covers a fair amount of territory in this video, from her experiences with lithium to her travels to Saturn.