Free An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison Page A

residents and clinical psychology interns in diagnostic techniques, psychological testing, psychotherapy, and, because of my background in psychopharmacology, some issues related to drug trials and medications. I was also the faculty liaison between the Departments of Psychiatry and Anesthesiology, where I did consultations, seminars, and put into place some research protocols that were designed to investigate psychological and medical aspects of pain. My own research consisted primarily of writing up some of the drug studies I had carried out in graduate school. I had no particular interest in either clinical work or research related to mood disorders, and as I had been almost entirely free of serious mood swings for more than a year, I assumed that those problems were behind me. Feeling normal for any extended period of time raises hopes that turn out, almost invariably, to be writ on water.
    I settled into my new job with great optimism and energy. I enjoyed teaching, and, although it initially seemed strange to be supervising the clinical work of others, I liked it. I found the transition from intern to faculty status far less difficult than I had imagined; it was, needless to say, one that was greatly helped along by an invigorating difference in salary. The relative freedom I had to pursue my own academic interests was intoxicating. I worked very hard and, looking back on it, slept very little. Decreased sleep is both a symptom of mania and a cause, but I didn’t know that at the time, and it probably would not have made any difference to me if I had. Summer had often brought me longer nights and higher moods, but this time it pushed meinto far higher, more dangerous and psychotic places than I had ever been. Summer, a lack of sleep, a deluge of work, and exquisitely vulnerable genes eventually took me to the back of beyond, past my familiar levels of exuberance and into florid madness.
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he chancellor’s garden party was given annually to welcome new faculty members to UCLA. By coincidence the man who was to become my psychiatrist also happened to be attending the garden party, having himself just joined the adjunct medical school faculty. It proved to be an interesting example of the divide between one’s self-perception and the cooler, more measured observations of an experienced clinician who suddenly found himself in a social situation watching a somewhat wild-eyed and frenzied former intern that he, as the recent chief resident, had supervised the preceding year. My recollection of the situation was that I was perhaps a bit high, but primarily I remember talking to scads of people, feeling that I was irresistibly charming, and zipping around from hors d’oeuvre to hors d’oeuvre, and drink to drink. I talked with the chancellor for a long time; he, of course, had absolutely no idea who I was, but he was either being exceedingly polite by talking to me for so long or simply holding true to his reputation as having a penchant for young women. Whatever he actually felt, I was sure he was finding me captivating.
    I also had an extended and rather odd conversation with the chairman of my department—odd, but a conversation I found delightful. My chairman was himself a not unexpansive person, and he harbored a very imaginativemind that did not always keep within the common grazing lands of academic medicine. He was somewhat notorious within psychopharmacology circles for having accidentally killed a rented circus elephant with LSD—a complicated, rather improbable story involving large land mammals in must, temporal lobe glands, the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on violent behavior, and miscalculated volumes and surface areas—and we started a long, dendritic discussion about doing research on elephants and hyraxes. Hyraxes are small African animals that bear no resemblance whatsoever to elephants but, based on the patterning of their teeth, are thought to be their closest living relatives. I cannot begin to