Kay Redfield Jamison

Professional Life
Kay Redfield Jamison is one of the leading authorities on bipolar. Born on June 22, 1946, Jamison received her degree in clinical psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She stayed on at UCLA to continue her studies, and in 1975, Jamison received her Ph.D. She accepted a teaching position at the school and eventually established the Affective Disorders Clinic at UCLA. After working at UCLA for several years, Jamison left California to assume the position of Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Maryland. She also traveled the world giving lectures at such institutions as the University of Oxford and Harvard University.

Jamison has received numerous awards and honors for her work in the field of psychology. She has held the position of president for various associations, and received the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention Research Award, and the National Mental Health Association’s William Styron Award. In addition to the many articles she has written, Jamison is also the author of several best-selling books, including An Unquiet Mind, her account of her personal ordeal with bipolar. She is recognized as an authority on suicide and mental illness, and her book, Night Falls Fast, provides a valuable insight into the relationship between the two.

Contribution to Psychology
Jamison, one of the world’s foremost authorities on bipolar published her first book, Manic Depressive Illness, in 1990. In the textbook, Jamison described the illness with a clarity that could only come from one living with illness. Unbeknownst to her colleagues, she was not only a doctor and researcher studying bipolar, but Jamison herself had lived with bipolar for as long as she could remember. Having the condition while maintaining a clinical perspective gave her a unique insight into how bipolar affected her clients. When she disclosed her condition publicly in her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, her already solid credibility deepened within the medical community.

Jamison has published several books on the subject of bipolar and has lectured throughout the world, raising awareness of the condition. She has said that despite the negative consequences she has suffered from bipolar, if given a choice, she would not live without it. She describes the link between bipolar and creativity in many of her books and shows through her own resilience, how even with the diagnosis of bipolar, one can achieve great things.

Books by Kay Redfield Jamison

• Manic-Depressive Illness (with Frederick Goodwin, 1990)
• Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993)
• An Unquiet Mind (1995)
• Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide (1999)
• Exuberance: The Passion for Life (2004)
• Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir (2009)