In an interview on Moral Philosophy

This is a very different one – Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind.

Kay Redfield Jamison is a psychologist who has co-authored the major psychiatric textbook on manic depression. It authoritatively covers every aspect of the science, from genetics to pharmacology, and also has chapters on the links with creativity and on what the illness feels like. The chapters on the subjective experience are enriched with vivid quotations from patients. In her autobiography, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Jamison came out as not only an expert on the illness but also someone who has it. The power of her book comes from her understanding it both scientifically and from the inside.

She describes the sheer awfulness of the periods of depression and (perhaps less convincingly, anyway as a point about people in general) the richness of the high periods. She brings out the importance of both medication and psychotherapy in helping people with the disorder. And she has interesting thoughts on the way her identity is bound up with the illness.

She asks the quite fundamental question of whether she would rather not have had manic depression. She answers unequivocally that, without modern medication, the depression would be so terrible that she would much prefer not to have the illness. But she lives in a time when the medication is available, and – perhaps surprisingly – her answer is that she is not sorry to have manic depression. She is acutely aware of its costs, but thinks that it has given her life a certain emotional resonance she would be sorry to be without. Many with the illness might disagree. But the book, and the life it describes, is a remarkable example of how – as her mother once put it – it matters not only what cards life has dealt you, but also how you play them.