Academic Contributions
Her book Manic-Depressive Illness (co-authored with Frederick K. Goodwin) is the classic textbook on bipolar disorder.
Her seminal works among laypeople are her memoir An Unquiet Mind, which details her experience with severe mania and depression, and Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, providing historical, religious, and cultural responses to suicide, as well as the relationship between mental illness and suicide. In Night Falls Fast, Jamison dedicates a chapter to American public policy and public opinion as it relates to suicide. Her second memoir, Nothing Was the Same, examines her relationship with her second husband, the psychiatrist Richard Jed Wyatt, who was Chief of the Neuropsychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health until his death in 2002.
In her study Exuberance: The Passion for Life, she cites research which suggests that 15 percent of people who could be diagnosed as manic depressive may never actually become depressed; in effect, they are permanently 'high' on life. She mentions President Theodore Roosevelt as an example.
Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament is Jamison's exploration of how bipolar disorder can run in artistic or high-achieving families. As an example, she cites Lord Byron and his relatives.
Read more about this topic: Kay Redfield Jamison
Famous quotes containing the word academic:
“You know lots of criticism is written by characters who are very academic and think it is a sign you are worthless if you make jokes or kid or even clown. I wouldn’t kid Our Lord if he was on the cross. But I would attempt a joke with him if I ran into him chasing the money changers out of the temple.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)