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

remember the detailed arguments and common interests underlying this strange and extremely animated conversation—except that I immediately, and with great gusto, took upon myself the task of tracking down every article, and there were hundreds, ever written about hyraxes. I also volunteered to work on animal behavior studies at the Los Angeles Zoo, as well as to co-teach a course in ethology and yet another one in pharmacology and ethology.
    My memories of the garden party were that I had had a fabulous, bubbly, seductive, assured time. My psychiatrist, however, in talking with me about it much later, recollected it very differently. I was, he said, dressed in a remarkably provocative way, totally unlike the conservative manner in which he had seen me dressed over the preceding year. I had on much more makeup than usual and seemed, to him, to be frenetic and far too talkative. He says he remembers having thought to himself, Kay looks manic. I, on the other hand, had thought I was splendid.
    M
y mind was beginning to have to scramble a bit to keep up with itself, as ideas were coming so fast that they intersected one another at every conceivable angle. There was a neuronal pileup on the highways of my brain, and the more I tried to slow down my thinking the more I became aware that I couldn’t. My enthusiasms were going into overdrive as well, although there often was some underlying thread of logic in what I was doing. One day, for example, I got into a frenzy of photocopying: I made thirty to forty copies of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, an article about religion and psychosis from the
American Journal of Psychiatry
, and another article, “Why I Do Not Attend Case Conferences,” written by a prominent psychologist who had elucidated all of the reasons why teaching rounds, when poorly conducted, are such a horrendous waste of time. All three of these articles seemed to me, quite suddenly, to have profound meaning and relevance for the clinical staff on the ward. So I passed them out to everyone I could.
    What is interesting to me now is not that I did such a typically manic thing; rather, it’s that there was some prescience and sense in those early days of incipient madness. The ward rounds
were
a complete waste of time, although the ward chief was less than appreciative of my pointing it out to everyone (and even less appreciative of my circulating the article to the entire staff). The Millay poem, “Renascence,” was one I had read as a young girl, and, as my mood became more and more ecstatic, and my mind started racing ever and ever faster, I somehow remembered it with utter clarity and straightaway looked it up. Although I was just beginningmy journey into madness, the poem described the entire cycle I was about to go through: it started with normal perceptions of the world (“All I could see from where I stood / Was three long mountains and a wood”) and then continued through ecstatic and visionary states to unremitting despair and, finally, reemergence into the normal world, but with heightened awareness. Millay was nineteen years old when she wrote the poem, and, although I did not know it at the time, she later survived several breakdowns and hospitalizations. Somehow, in the strange state I was in, I knew that the poem had meaning for me; I understood it totally. I gave it to the residents and interns as a metaphorical description of the psychotic process and the important possibilities in a subsequent renewal. The residents, unaware of the internal flurry that propelled the readings, seemed to respond well to the articles and, almost to the person, expressed pleasure in the break from their regular medical reading.
    During this same period of increasingly feverish behavior at work, my marriage was falling apart. I separated from my husband, ostensibly because I wanted children and he didn’t—which was true and important—but it was far more complicated than that. I was increasingly restless,