Unquiet Mind Research Articles

Heroin Chic Resurgence: The Unintentional Romanticization of Female Mental Illness as Depicted in Girl, Interrupted, Prozac Nation and An Unquiet Mind

A research article involving the literary analysis of novels Girl, Interrupted, Prozac Nation and An Unquiet Mind to better understand the unintentional romanticization of female mental illness within the text. Using this information, I connect the three novels to the resurgence in the romanticization of mental illness within current trends and social media.

Lithium therapy in literature and art

Introduction. In 1949, Australian psychiatrist John Cade described a therapeutic action of lithium carbonate in mania. This date is regarded as an introduction of lithium into contemporary psychiatric therapeutics and the beginning of modern psychopharmacology. In the early 1960s, a prophylactic activity of lithium was observed, preventing recurrences of affective episodes in mood disorders. Lithium has become a prototype of the mood-stabilising drugs and remains a drug of the first choice for the prophylaxis of recurrences in bipolar mood disorder. Literature review. Both the introduction of lithium into psychiatric therapy and its therapeutic action has been reflected in literature and art. This article presents the connections of lithium therapy with literature and art. They pertain to such characters as John Cade, Salvador Luria, Patty Duke, Kay Jamison, Jerzy Broszkiewicz, Ota Pavel, Robert Lowell, Jaime Lowe, Nicole Lyons, Kurt Cobain, Sting, and the band Evanescence. Conclusions. Special attention was given to the book Unquiet mind, written in 1996 by Kay Jamison, professor of psychology. In the book, her personal bipolar disorder and lithium treatment were described from the viewpoint of the eminent professional. Polish translation of the book titled Niespokojny umysł already has two editions: in 2000 and 2018.

Guillermo ArriagaSalvar el fuego

Books in Review are denuded. She shatters her constructed marital idyll, revealing her dead husband as a controlling megalomaniac, given to cruel condescension and predatory engagements with his young assistants. The literary pursuit of this suburban New England septuagenarian widow becomes a channel for the undulations of her unquiet mind, an attempt to preserve the passing of her ungrieved life. “That was what I meant to write all along–my story, my last lines. My name was Vesta,” she writes, eerily replacing Magda’s name with her own. Written and shelved in 2015, the novel emerges from the drawer at a time when isolation is the mechanism of daily affairs, uncannily reflected in the distanced and misanthropic Vesta who is steeped in several layers of self-imposed isolation. Death in Her Hands is not a book of answers; reading it in the midst of social loneliness generates great excitement but little comfort . Typical of Moshfegh’s novels, this one is just as unpredictable and sparks in its readers a confused curiosity as it hiccups along a hallucinatory trail. Vesta wants to insist on life, and for a while the novel pretends to share her insistence. But it resolutely refuses to allow her any safe harbor, which is perhaps its most brutal inclination. She is betrayed by her two companions (her husband and her dog); the narrative strongly hints that the note—the fount of Vesta’s artistic obsession —is only a prop from a detective game her dying neighbor is playing. “Don’t you know there is no life after death?” she is asked, puncturing the aorta of her literary memorialization. Moshfegh toys with the possibility of suggesting art as an antidote to death and oblivion; after all, Vesta is given a book to aid her in her mourning. But this life buoy is quickly yanked away the moment we get too comfortable in the safety of that idea. Cruelty is Moshfegh’s sleight of hand. Ashmita Chatterjee Kolkata, India Guillermo Arriaga Salvar el fuego Miami. Alfaguara. 2020. 659 pages. GUILLERMO ARRIAGA’S Salvar el fuego has garnered him the prestigious Alfaguara Novel Prize for 2020. A major figure in Mexican cinema, Arriaga is an internationally recognized screenwriter, director, and producer. Salvar el fuego, his most ambitious fiction, contains many of the themes as well as the narrative techniques that characterize both his films and previous novels. Salvar el fuego has four main characters: Marina Longines, a wealthy and ostensibly happily married woman with three children who is a choreographer and owns her own dance company; José Cuauhtémoc Huiztlic, a man imprisoned for killing his father, who was a distinguished indigenous scholar; Francisco Cuitláhuac Huiztlic, José’s brother; and El Máquinas, an elite hitman for a drug cartel, whom José meets in prison when he is serving a sentence for killing his father. Once he has done his time, José looks up his prison buddy who, when José becomes hospitalized with serious infections from insect bites, gets his cartel boss to pay for his treatment. This act precipitates events that lead to José killing of a young hired assassin and a police commandant, actions that earn him a trip back to prison with a fifty-year sentence. Marina is close to a wealthy gay couple, Pedro and Hector, who are patrons of the arts. They sponsor cultural events and literary workshops at the prison where José is serving his sentence. They invite Marina to have her company present their work there, where she meets and falls in love with José, something that rips her from her comfortable upper-class life and stable marriage and threatens her existence. Through these characters, the novel lays bare the gulf that exists in Mexico between the wealthy and poor and the lack of justice and opportunities for the latter. At the beginning of the novel, José describes Mexico as a nation divided between the haves, who live in fear they will lose everything they have, and the have-nots, who live in rage for what they do not have. The scourges of political corruption, machismo, and the violence fueled by the drug trade also receive treatment in the novel. In Salvar...

Mental illness, debt – and a breathing space

People with bipolar disorder often find a manic or hypomanic episode manifests itself in a massive spending spree. As Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinically bipolar professor of psychiatry and mental health expert remarks in her book, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness: ‘So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.’

Identity, Bipolar Disorder, and the Problem of Self-Narration in Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and Ellen Forney's Marbles.

The field of narrative medicine holds that personal narratives about illness have the potential to give illness meaning and to create order out of disparate facets of experience, thereby aiding a patient's treatment and resisting universalizing medical discourse. Two narratives of bipolar disorder, Kay Redfield Jamison's prose memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995) and Ellen Forney's graphic memoir Marbles (2012) challenge these ideas. These writers demonstrate that one result of bipolar disorder is a rupture to their sense of identity, making straightforward and verbal forms of narrative impossible. During periods of relative mood stability, reliable memories of mania or depression are equally impossible. As a result, these memoirists seek to develop sources of self-knowledge other than memory and introspection, long the foundations of personal narrative. Finally, An Unquiet Mind and Marbles return attention to questions of selfhood at a time when scholarship on memoir rejects interpretations of life stories as clear and reliable expressions of identity.

Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison

Reviewed by: Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison Jeffrey Berman (bio) Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire. Kay Redfield Jamison. New York: Knopf, 2017. 532 pp. Kay Redfield Jamison's magisterial Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire reveals two stories: the one she tells, about the most famous American postwar poet, who struggled with severe manic-depressive illness throughout his adult life, and the other she does not tell, about her own battle with the same mood disorder. The two stories, stitched seamlessly together, are both fascinating. Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was the early major figure behind the Confessional poetry movement, later joined by two of his Boston University students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Lowell's Life Studies, one of the transformative poetry volumes of the twentieth century, won the 1960 National Book Award. Two other poetry volumes, Lord Weary's Castle and The Dolphin, earned Pulitzer Prizes in 1947 and 1974, respectively. Lowell served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an appointment now called the U.S. Poet Laureate, from 1947–1948. He was one of the few poets to appear on the cover of Time magazine, in June 1967, where he was hailed as the "best American poet of his generation." Lowell was born into an illustrious Boston family that included on his paternal side the poets James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) and Amy Lowell (1874–1925), also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and on his maternal side the Calvinist fire-and-brimstone theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan preacher and poet Anne Hutchinson. Serious mental instability affected both sides of Lowell's family. He suffered sixteen psychotic breaks, beginning in his early thirties, resulting in prolonged hospitalizations, many of which occurred at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, according to Jamison's research, his great-great-grandmother (James Russell Lowell's mother) had also been institutionalized a century earlier. Madness was the overwhelming fear in Lowell's life, [End Page 105] but rather than concealing his psychiatric breakdowns, he frequently wrote about them, both to destigmatize mental illness and to show how his creativity was allied to his mercurial moods. Madness became, as Jamison demonstrates, a driving force behind his poetry. No one is better qualified to write about manic-depressive illness than Jamison. She is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she has taught since the mid-1980s. She is the coauthor, with the psychiatrist Frederick K. Goodwin, of Manic-Depressive Illness, first published in 1990 and republished in a second edition in 2007 with the subtitle: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. Over twelve hundred pages long, the tome is still regarded as the standard medical text on the subject. Jamison's second book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993), remains the single best study of the relationship between mood disorders and creativity. Not until her third book, however, the searing memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995), did Jamison write about her own history of manic depression and close encounter with suicide. Her spousal loss memoir, Nothing Was the Same (2009), is a heartfelt tribute to the memory of her husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a noted schizophrenia researcher who died of cancer in 2002 at age sixty-three. A recipient in 2001 of a MacArthur Fellowship, Jamison has earned several major awards, including being chosen by Time magazine as a "Hero of Medicine." In Robert Lowell, Jamison's luminous prose and the metaphorical power of her language reveal her own poetic side. Her book on Lowell is about "fire in the blood and darkness; it is about mania and the precarious, deranging altitude to which mania ascends. It is about the poetic imagination and how mania and imagination come together to create great art. But it is as much and more about the vital role of discipline and character in making art from inborn gift" (p. 4). She could have been describing herself. Jamison focuses on a single poet, but her book is, in a larger sense, a study of poetry's...

The Unquiet Mind Cancer: The Metaethical Quandary of Therapies

The Unquiet Mind Cancer: The Metaethical Quandary of Therapies

Expose of a Breakdown

Expose of a Breakdown Ingrid Hindell Iregard my pension as a social wage, and even though I wish it took my disability and the extra costs that brings into consideration, eighteen years ago, I felt privileged to be able to work in the community, not in a sheltered workshop. At this time, a number of us worked voluntarily for numerous little organizations when the government cut their funding and in effect, took away our jobs. It was around this time that I started a “stress cough.” Foolishly, I didn’t take much notice. I was enjoying “life”—studying, working, taking part in a documentary called “Untold Desires” and being a member of the “Friendship Group”—in which a group of us tackled the subject and nature of friendship for people with and without disabilities. . . . The processes and the cohesion of the group brought up a lot of “stuff” for me that I wasn’t able to articulate. It made me question the wisdom of my lifestyle up to then—of marrying a person without a physical disability, for example. My mother used to tell me to tell him to tidy the flat, not in the least realizing that: i) it was distressing that I couldn’t do this; ii) that given all our interests it was difficult to tidy up. (This situation was also not helped, I now realize, by us trying to live and run home businesses from my small three–roomed accommodation behind my parent’s home, without enough support worker hours. . . .) The flat was always cluttered, not conducive to encouraging a feeling of ease in us bringing clients onto the premises. As Robert’s massage workload grew, so did our underlying tension, I see now. And when I was starting to counsel other people with disabilities the situation was made worse. . . . Added to this, my mother had, just prior to this period in our lives, stopped giving us our main meal because we were becoming more and more interested in eating organic and vegetarian food. At the same time, listening to other group members’ stories made me realize how “undervalued” people with disabilities are in society as I had been brought up in a loving extended family and had not long been “out.” It made me realize how much people with disabilities were constrained by lack of governmental funding for recreational—especially relationship options—with each other and with able–bodied people. The government was trying to close down little advocacy organizations that could keep this issue in the forefront of policy makers’ minds. No wonder I was getting close to breaking point! [End Page E1] When I got really bad, my husband almost went mad himself trying to cope with me. I had been the outgoing partner in the relationship for the past 12 years. Now I was getting panic attacks and clinging like poison ivy. . . . And the therapists I went to at that stage didn’t help. The Naturopath was so expensive she made me much worse. She had told a “friend” of Rob’s that she would treat me for $30.00 a time. She did not say that she would present me with an ever– increasing bill every time I had an appointment—to pay her back when I could! And that her admin assistant would keep commenting, in my hearing, that people wouldn’t pay their bills on time. . . . At last, when the amount got to $450.00, I paid her all my savings, and managed to quit. I now also believe she treated me with a totally inappropriate therapy—colonic irrigation—for far too long, any natural therapist would say nowadays—five weeks! I believe it made my mental state worse. People say that an unquiet mind can stress the body into illness but I believe losing too much weight too fast as I certainly did, stressed my mind, instead of other way around. By this time I wasn’t only having panic attacks. I had slipped into, what I recently discovered, was a clinical depression. This brought in its wake, a terror so real, so all encompassing that I wonder I lived through a day of it—much less four...

Mood disorders in cancer patients

‘If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?’ (Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness) Mood is a person’s subjective emotional state. According to the DSM-IV the term mood disorder is used for a group of diagnoses where the primary symptom is a disturbance in mood, or in other words the experience of an inappropriate, exaggerated or limited range of feelings. Mood disorders can mainly be divided into two groups: (1) depressive episode(s) characterised by feelings of sadness, hopelessness, helplessness, guilt, suicidal thoughts, fatigue, appetite changes, concentration problems and troubles engaging in daily living tasks; (2) manic or hypomanic episode(s) characterised by feelings of grandiosity, extreme energy and heightened arousal. Several treatment options are available for mood disorders – e.g. medication, cognitive and/or behavioural therapy – depending on the severity and the evaluation of the health-care provider. Several studies have shown that mood disorders are common in patients with cancer. In a meta-analysis, the point prevalence of major depression was about 16% and that of anxiety was 10% [1]. The exact causes of mood disorders are largely unknown, but it is hypothesised that an imbalance in neurotransmitters is likely to play a role. The mood disorder can be triggered by the cancer diagnosis on its own, or it can be treatment-induced in cases where the aetiology can be found in the physiological effect of a psychoactive drug or chemical substance. These articles provide an overview of the most common mood disorders among cancer patients. First, Dr. Dauchy will discuss the prevalence, predictive factors and treatment options of depression, one of the most under-diagnosed and inadequately treated mood disorders among cancer patients. Second, Professor Caraceni will introduce drug-associated delirium, an altered state of consciousness with reduced awareness of self and the environment, which may go hand in hand with the inability to think and talk clearly and rationally, hallucinations, disorientation and cognitive impairment. Third, Dr. Die Trill will discuss anxiety, one of the most frequently reported reactions to a cancer diagnosis, which may persist throughout the cancer continuum. In addition, she will shine her light on sleep disorders, which are frequently associated with psychological disorders. Finally, Dr. Schagen will describe the chemotherapy-related changes in cognitive functioning, which can result in diminished functional independence and can last throughout the survivorship period.

“A Fire in the Blood”: Metaphors of Bipolar Disorder in Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind

Content analysis of three chapters of Jamison's memoir, An Unquiet Mind, shows that depression, mania, and Bipolar Disorder have a common metaphoric core as a sequential process of suffering and adversity that is a form of malevolence and destruction. Depression was down and in, while mania was up, in and distant, circular and zigzag, a powerful force of quickness and motion, fieriness, strangeness, seduction, expansive extravagance, and acuity. Bipolar Disorder is down and away and a sequential and cyclical process that partakes of the metaphors of its component moods. We conclude that metaphors of mood disorders share a number of structural features and are consistent across different authors.

Rumination in bipolar disorder: evidence for an unquiet mind

Depression in bipolar disorder has long been thought to be a state characterized by mental inactivity. However, recent research demonstrates that patients with bipolar disorder engage in rumination, a form of self-focused repetitive cognitive activity, in depressed as well as in manic states. While rumination has long been associated with depressed states in major depressive disorder, the finding that patients with bipolar disorder ruminate in manic states is unique to bipolar disorder and challenges explanations put forward for why people ruminate. We review the research on rumination in bipolar disorder and propose that rumination in bipolar disorder, in both manic and depressed states, reflects executive dysfunction. We also review the neurobiology of bipolar disorder and recent neuroimaging studies of rumination, which is consistent with our hypothesis that the tendency to ruminate reflects executive dysfunction in bipolar disorder. Finally, we relate the neurobiology of rumination to the neurobiology of emotion regulation, which is disrupted in bipolar disorder.

APA's Hidden Gem: The IPS

APA's Hidden Gem: The IPS

Madness: A Bipolar Life

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessMadness: A Bipolar LifePaul Plasky M.D., Ph.D.Paul Plasky M.D., Ph.D.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jan 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2008.59.11.1354AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail In Madness, Marya Hornbacker has written a first-person account of her struggle with bipolar disorder from her childhood through her late twenties. Using the for>m of a streaming monologue, all in the present tense, she has produced a chaotic and titillating portrait of rapid cycling, self-harm, and alcohol abuse. The tone of her book is set in her introductory chapter, a graphic description of a cutting episode with blood spurting around the room, with italics and exclamation marks going on for pages. She experiences it all here: mania and isolation, sadness and delusions, fighting and sex. There is lots of intense drinking, impulsive travel, and grandiose start-overs, all related with a sense of urgency and immediacy. However, it seems at times that nothing is learned and little is gained. Episodes blend into each other; people come and go. It makes for wild reading, but it is uncertain whether it contributes to our knowledge about a terrible, life-threatening illness. Describing a fire is not the same as understanding it. Underneath all this, of course, there is a keen mind that knows how to write a compelling sentence. Hornbacker makes good use of her book by offering several helpful informational appendices and an excellent bibliography citing the more readable guides to bipolar disorder. Also to her credit, she is positive about treatment and medication, and she tries to normalize the experience of electroconvulsive therapy, a task that cannot be done too often. Oddly enough, she has written about some of this same material before in her previous best-selling memoir, Wasted, which describes her earlier struggle with an eating disorder. She demonstrates that like many patients with bipolar disorder, she was misdiagnosed and improperly treated. Who is the likely audience for this book? Given the age of the author during these events, the older adolescent may readily relate to it. However, it is not a book to give to your patients who are trying to come to terms with a new diagnosis of bipolar disorder; it simply has too much drama. Medical students may find it useful as an introduction to the field because it is fast reading and leaves a strong impression. Of course, the benchmark book in this area is Kay Jamison's An Unquiet Mind, a masterwork of balance, insight, and information, and this should be any reader's first choice for a first-hand account of bipolar disorder. Dr. Plasky is medical director at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Hospital, Worcester. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 59Issue 11 November, 2008Pages 1354-1354PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES November 2008 Volume 59 Number 11 Metrics PDF download History Published online 13 January 2015 Published in print 1 November 2008

Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (review)

Emily Martin, Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 370 pp. In her new book, Emily Martin, well known for her cultural analyses of subjects such as childbirth and immunology, addresses the popular fascination with manic behavior in the U.S. today. One of her main goals is to answer the question of how popular notions of are related to psychiatric conceptions of bipolar disorder (also called manic-depressive illness). Bipolar Disorder is a serious mental illness with an estimated prevalence among adults of approximately 2.5 percent. It is characterized by dramatic and episodic mood swings ranging from to depression. The episodes can also involve delusions, typically more often in episodes of than in depression. Although bipolar disorder is treatable, it is chronic, debilitating, and can lead to suicide. As Kay Redfield Jameson explained it in her 1995 book, An Unquiet Mind, Manic-depression distorts moods and thoughts, incites dreadful behaviors, destroys the basis of rational thought, and too often erodes the desire and will to live. It is an illness that is biological in its origins, yet one that feels psychological in the experience of it; an illness that is unique in conferring advantage and pleasure, yet one that brings in its wake almost unendurable suffering and, not infrequently, suicide. Martin notes, however, that has also been associated with creativity, energy, and capitalist success. Noting that the subject of has received less scholarly attention than depression, she aims to find out how people with and the professionals who study and treat it use the concept of mania across a range of settings: support groups, clinical presentations, and media coverage, for example. Martin pays special attention to how concepts of rationality and irrationality are fitted into the framework of mania, since has long been associated in the U.S. and western Europe with madness and insanity. As someone who has bipolar disorder, Martin is interested in exploring the opposition between rationality and insanity. Is she, herself, rational? Being known as a manic-depressive person, she writes, throws one's rationality into question, and yet increasingly in the U.S., mania has become associated with economic (rational) success. As a medical anthropologist, Martin is concerned with showing that is a cultural phenomenon and determining what role and associated concepts play in contemporary culture: for example, in the domains of mental health care, the pharmaceutical industry, capitalism and financial markets. In Part One, Manic Depression as Experience, Martin does what she does best: documenting medical and psychological constructs as lived experience. Members of a support group she studies describe the tension between as something within their power and also overpowering, as if it possessed them. In the context of bipolar disorder, this opposition ramifies to a bifurcation of the world into multiple opposing spheres, such as the part (depression or mania) and the system (oscillating, mutually constitutive forces), self (a true self) and other (becoming a person or different personalities during episodes), irrationality (madness) and rationality (the medicalization of mood and motivation, and the frameworks people use to describe their mania, or perform their as behavior that is at least partly under their own control). Martin is not suggesting that people with bipolar disorder can be characterized by one side of an opposition. The opposition, or rather one's existence at multiple sites simultaneously along a bipolar continuum, represents the way that people experience themselves. She stresses that is, in the words of Merleau- Ponty, an expressive space defined by both the mediation of these poles and some element of control over movement between them. …

Dublin in July

Their foul exhalations, wearing ads For Women on the Verge ofHRT And images of lissome men and women Vacationing in Portugal and Spain. Whatever I was thinking when that siren Erupted from the din, its two notes blaring, Was gone before I knew it, leaving only A quick impression of a speeding engine, A red-faced driver screaming out his window, The heads and shoulders of pedestrians Turning to watch the swiftly passing show. Where is the stillness at the heart of things? Where the silence? Here in the midst of movement, My own unquiet mind pursuing Dogen s Notion that the hungry, angry self Advancing toward the world creates delusion, I listen for that stillness and that silence, As though they might be heard in horns and sirens.

Do Psychiatric Drugs Dampen Artists' Creativity?

Jamison is author of several well-known books, including An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, about her own experiences with bipolar disorder, and Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Creative Mind, in which she discusses the lives and works of artists and writers such as Vincent Van Gogh, Lord Byron, and Robert Lowell and how their creative works may have been affected by symptoms of mania and depression. She also co-wrote Manic-Depressive Illness with Frederick Goodwin, M.D., considered a classic work.

Paranoid Park (review)

Reviewed by: Paranoid Park Cindy Welch Nelson, Blake Paranoid Park. Viking, 2006180p ISBN 0-670-06118-2$15.99 R Gr. 7-12 Visiting the edgy skate park Paranoid Park is an impulse that changes the nameless narrator's life, as does meeting homeless skateboarders and hopping a train with a skater named Scratch, who is headed for the next town on a unique kind of beer run. If a private security guard on the train hadn't seen them both and started brutally beating Scratch with his nightstick, the narrator would never have gone to Scratch's aid by knocking the guard to the ground. Unfortunately, he does, and the guard is then dragged under the train and sliced in two across the tracks. The narrator is able to get away and clean everything but his conscience; when a police officer shows up at his high school and starts asking questions, his guilt intensifies, and he believes it's only a matter of time until they come for him. Subplots about the narrator's parents divorcing, his losing his virginity to the wrong girl while falling for the right girl, and his interactions with skating friends from school are simply yet effectively written as a backdrop for the incident and its Poe-like echoes in his head and heart. An opening quote from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment foreshadows the psychological tenseness of this teen drama, and Nelson's style feeds that drama by tending toward the stark without being abrupt, effectively suggesting the unquiet mind of a boy working his way through a haze of regret, horror, and responsibility. Although the ending is a bit neat, teens will embrace the narrator's dilemma, his difficulties with family and friends, and the spare prose that moves the story along like the steady beating of a human pulse. Pair this with a retelling or adaptation of Crime and Punishment or Poe's "The Telltale Heart" for lively discussion. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

An unquiet mind in the workplace: mental illness and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995

New Labour's recent ‘Welfare to Work’ policies encourage people with disabilities, where possible, to enter and participate in the workplace. The current policy of ‘inclusion’ is supported by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (DDA), which came into force in December 1996 providing those who are discriminated against on the grounds of their disability with an action against their employer. Drawing upon recently decided case law, this paper considers what the DDA offers those who are discriminated against because of a mental illness. I argue that policy-makers, courts and tribunals, because the relationship between physical and mental impairments is often misunderstood, fail to reflect the varied nature of or understand the stigma associated with, mental ill health. The law is thus at present incapable of providing adequate protection for mentally impaired individuals who attempt to participate or remain in the labour market, and new approaches, which are sensitive to the diverse nature of disability, need to be considered.

Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD: from an unquiet mind to rational exuberance.

AS HER DROOPY-FACED BASSET hound, Bubbles, snores on a chair, Kay Redfield Jamison, PhD, relates a favorite cartoon: a man in 19th-century garb smiles at a raven and says, “Hello, birdie.” The caption? “Poe on Prozac.” That single frame captures reels of Jamison’s life. The theme, of connections between art and mental health, is a favorite of Jamison’s—the topic of her 1993 book Touched With Fire and a subsequent public television series she produced with her late husband, schizophrenia researcher Richard J. Wyatt, MD. And, like Poe, she lives with manicdepressive illness, a term she interchanges with “bipolar disorder.” Her 1990 textbook on the topic, ManicDepressive Illness, cowritten with Frederick Goodwin, MD, established her as a top expert on the illness. Jamison holds a full professorship and teaches one day a week at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Baltimore. Although very few people who take parttime faculty positions at Hopkins advance to become full professors, “With her . . . it was a slam dunk. I mean, she was the world expert,” says Raymond DePaulo, Jr, MD, director of the Department of Psychiatry at Hopkins. Her best-selling 1995 memoir, An Unquiet Mind, broadened Jamison’s renown outside of psychiatric circles and helped trigger a wave of advocacy for mental illness acceptance that is still breaking. Congress, for instance, is considering bills to establish insurance parity for mental health. Jamison’s accomplishments and stature can be intimidating, said another, younger colleague, Hopkins psychiatrist Francis Mondimore, MD. But, “she’s very accessible,” he says.

Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewsFull AccessUnholy Ghost: Writers on DepressionCurtis E. HartmannCurtis E. HartmannSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Jan 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.53.1.106AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail The book's dust jacket features a forlorn broken-down car stranded in snow at the edge of a winter forest. This image is an apt metaphor for the debilitating grip of depression. The book's title, Unholy Ghost, is also apt for a disease that is indeed an elusive terror without sacrament. In plain terms, clinical depression is pure, unadulterated hell—a dimension that the book aggressively portrays.Kay Redfield Jamison, a renowned professor of psychiatry and author of An Unquiet Mind, contributes a powerful and inviting introduction. "Here," Jamison writes, "are writers who know, through experience, depression in one or more of its diverse guises, describe the sadness and dread that are at its core; they write about how it is to feel the draining out of vital forces; how it is to exist with, and live around, the sleeplessness, the restlessness, the inertia, and the hopelessness. They describe the lingering influences of melancholia on their notions of self and work, and they portray the damage that their despair brings to the lives of others."Novelist William Styron, who was nearly killed by the disease, wrote Darkness Visible, a stunning account of lapse into depression's cold, gray tunnel, which is excerpted in the book. Styron vividly rejects the word "depression" as a lame, impotent, and, at best, clinical approximation of what the disease does and is. "For over seventy years," Styron writes—and Jamison emphasizes— "the word has slithered innocuously through the language like a slug, leaving little trace of its intrinsic malevolence and preventing, by its very insipidity, a general awareness of the horrible intensity of the disease when out of control." Depression put Styron on the brink of suicide and became, in his words, "an immense and aching solitude."Jamison cites other writers who have eloquently described the nearness to death and the intrinsic hopelessness of clinical depression. She mentions A. Alvarez's The Savage God, another brilliantly choreographed "dread-dance" of pain, hopelessness, despair, and the lure of suicide, that is excerpted in the book. "My life felt so cluttered and obstructed that I could hardly breathe," Alvarez says. "I inhabited a closed, concentrated world, airless and without exits." Such prose gets to the awful essence of severe clinical depression. The disease, at its near fatal endpoint, is just what Alvarez describes: "A Living Death. A Life by Suffocation."The book puts a human face on what is so often a stark, clinical framework, such as that described in DSM-IV. It also recognizes the devastating effect the disease has on the people who are close to those afflicted. Nell Casey, the volume's editor, has selected various essays that portray the infectious "intruder-in-the-kitchen" nature of clinical depression. Casey's autobiographical account of living with her sister's manic-depression is included. The disease literally abducts her, creating "a frightening absence." But more than that, Casey writes, is "the removal of personality, the hidden, shadowy terror of devouring misery. The hollow lifelessness of her pupils, cartoonishly exaggerated into large, black pools from medication; the listless physicality."The disease is not totally without merit or value, however. Magazine writer Lesley Dorman, who also teaches fiction at the Writers Studio in New York City, claims that depression has given her a broadened life-perspective. "I marvel at my ability to move in and out of ordinary feelings like sadness and disappointment and worry," Dorman writes. "I continue to be stunned by the purity of these feelings, by the beauty of their rightful proportions to actual life events. I'm hardly carefree," she warns of depression's black threat. "I still scan myself for depression as if checking for broken bones."The essays in this book say so much more, and much of it is genuinely valuable. Unholy Ghost brings the reader to a profoundly different place, one where the disease can be viewed through a clear lens. I highly recommend it.Mr. Hartmann, a longtime sufferer of bipolar disorder, is an attorney and a freelance writer living in western Massachusetts.edited by Nell Casey; New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2001, 299 pages, $23 FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited By Volume 53Issue 1 January 2002Pages 106-107 Metrics History Published online 1 January 2002 Published in print 1 January 2002