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In 1995, a U.S. Navy veteran scaled a three-foot barrier at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., traversed a dirt buffer zone and swam across a 26-foot moat to the grassy habitat of the African lions. The next morning, her body was discovered mauled beyond recognition. In the days that followed, news emerged that the woman was schizophrenic and homeless, had been confined to psychiatric hospitals in California, Georgia and Arkansas, had claimed to be the sister of Jesus Christ and at times even Jesus himself. "Her mind," writes Kay Redfield Jamison in Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, forthcoming from Knopf, "was not entirely her own. She shared it with voices and visions and other sundry by-products of madness."
It was a madness with particular resonance for Jamison, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. For that same year, after months of intense deliberation, Jamison, too, threw herself to the lions. She released her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, exposing her own fierce and ongoing battle with manic depression and her own suicide attempt, which happened soon after she began taking lithium in 1974. This author, who'd fought her way to the front lines of mood disorder research, who had coauthored the standard textbook on manic depression and written Touched by Fire (Free Press, 1993), a groundbreaking study of manic depression and the creative spirit, was no neutral observer of the illness, the memoir revealed, but someone who'd experienced firsthand its ravages and turmoils. It was a revelation that threatened to demolish Jamison's personal life and end her career.
Instead, Jamison's star has steadily risen, as the popularity of An Unquiet Mind has multiplied by word of mouth in the national advocacy work she performs for the mentally ill and through mood disorder news groups on the Net. (Ever since someone posted her address online, she's received roughly 10,000 personal letters from strangers.) Jamison's public readings resemble mass therapy sessions, in which fans ask clinical questions about their own medications and moods and present her with photographs of loved ones who've committed suicide. "Every time I talk," she says, "if you just let the questions go, they would go on for hours, and they often do." William Safire has called An Unquiet Mind "the most emotionally moving book I've ever read about the emotions." In cloth and paperback, it's sold more than 300,000 copies.
In Jamison's cluttered office in the meandering Victorian home in Washington that she shares with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a physician at the National Institutes of Health, piles of paper and a massive volume called Comparative Pathology of Zoo Animals are shoved aside to create space on the couch for a visiting journalist. It's immediately clear that her present status as patron saint to America's roughly two million manic depressives has come at a considerable price.
"I'm not sure I'd choose to spend my life lecturing about a particular illness," she says, "but I think I'm very lucky to have the opportunity to do so. I think you find that in a lot of scientists. My colleagues are in cancer research because a mother or father died of cancer. They don't stop writing. They don't stop advocating. I keep telling myself, maybe I won't do so much, but it's hard to say no."
As if to illustrate her point, a phone call interrupts our conversation: it's a brother of Gidone Busch, the emotionally disturbed man gunned down after attacking a police office with a hammer the night before in Brooklyn. He's calling from his car phone en route to New York, and is seeking Jamison's help in raising awareness about mental illness. It's the first Jamison has heard of the case, but she takes an immediate interest. "I'm very sorry," she says. "Call me when you get to New York."
It is an event that reverberates with the themes of Jamison's new book, a study of suicide's history and psychopathology, its public health implications, family inheritances, the latest scientific advances and treatments and the coping methods of those left behind.
In early modern France, she tells us, the body of a suicide was dragged through the streets, hanged on a gallows, then thrown into the sewers or the city dump. That stigma persists today, she says, and played no small part in her decision to go public with her own psychiatric history. "One of the problems with suicide is people don't talk about it. It's bad enough that you have to deal with it, much less think there's something shameful about it."
Suicide, which kills roughly 300,000 Americans each year, is a contagious phenomenon, in Jamison's view. In Night Falls Fast, she describes several suicide epidemics, such as that at Mount Mihara, an active volcano in Japan that became a tourist site in the 1930s after hundreds of people flung themselves into the crater, and the continuing allure of the Golden Gate Bridge, from which more than 1000 people have plummeted since its construction in 1937.
In perhaps the book's most devastating chapter, "What Matters It, If Rope or Garter," a line from Thomas Chatterton, the 18th-century English p t who swallowed arsenic in his garret at the age of 17, she chronicles the desperation and resolve that mark suicide's victims. The methods of self-inflicted death that coroners have recorded over the years, she writes, include swallowing dynamite, acid and hot coals; walking into the snow with little clothing or provisions; "injecting into themselves every substance known to man," and more recently, provoking police officers to do the killing, a practice the police identify as "death by cop."
On the heels of this past June's Surgeon General's report on mental illness, the first of its kind, says Jamison, which called attention to the 500,000 suicide attempts treated in emergency rooms each year, and in the shadow of the killings at Columbine High, Jamison's stipulation that suicide is not just endemic to young people, but most often the product of acute mental instability, could not be more apropos. "Unfortunately," she says, "it's taken a series of tragedies to bring that home to people."
Of Romantics and Wombats
Though Jamison's writing is extremely precise, her books burst with ideas; epigrams; allusions to classical music, genetics and art; the latest psychopharmacology and ancient literature on moods and mental afflictions. She greets PW attired in a sun dress and Teva athletic sandals. Draping her lanky figure in a green armchair beneath a framed genealogy of Lord Byron, whose incendiary temperament she diagnosed as manic depressive in Touched by Fire, Jamison speaks quickly, her ideas emerging rat-a-tat-tat.
The books, scientific papers and keepsakes strewn about the room highlight her wide-ranging interests, which these days revolve ever more closely around the subjects of animals. The author who once, in the thr s of mania, bought 20 Penguin paperbacks because she wanted the penguins to form a colony, keeps statuettes of skunks, a giraffe and a polar bear within arm's reach. A corpulent basset hound, Pumpkin, periodically waddles back and forth across the floor, and a yellow traffic sign reading, "wombats, next 20 miles," hangs in her driveway.
In the past several months, Jamison has returned to the National Zoo, but with a very different mission. She is working with National Geographic to produce a heavily illustrated book on animal medicine, and has been making weekly rounds with the vets. Last week, it was sea lions, this week, the camels”"remarkably healthy animals," she says. "I've learned a lot about their temperament. They're very routinized"
Jamison's eclecticism, by contrast, may stem, in part, from a childhood whose routines constantly shifted, as her father, an air force meteorologist, was transferred from base to base. Yet Jamison has described her childhood as a "cocoon," an insular world of riding, softball, summers on the Chesapeake and literary and scientific pursuits (she even dissected turtles and frogs on the Ping-Pong table in her basement). It was "a strange world, but a very principled one," she says. "People in the military have an old-fashioned notion of patriotism. You're in a society that believes in giving their lives for their country."
What Jamison wasn't prepared for, however, was the stirrings of her own illness, whose roots traveled deep into her father's family history, but weren't ever discussed in the open. "The downside of being in the military is that psychiatry was not a word that was used with any warmth. It was pejorative. At that time, certainly if you were a pilot, and if you were an officer, you did not see a psychiatrist. It was that simple. My father was ill, and he didn't. That kept me from seeking help for a long time."
An Unquiet Mind traces Jamison's struggle to survive the savage fluctuations of her moods in subsequent years, as "floridly psychotic mania was followed, inevitably, by long and lacerating, black, suicidal depression." The book also describes her gradual compliance with a lithium regimen without which, she says, she would now be either insane or dead. It took a massive, self-inflicted overdose of lithium that left her comatose for several days, she says, before she was prepared to accept the severity of the disease.
"When I came out of my coma," she says, "I knew it was very clear that this illness was going to kill me. You'd like to think you could learn a little more easily, but it took that for me to realize that I was going to die. I think that's one thing that led to my interest in suicide. I know people die from it."
In an age of hypersophisticated mood-altering drugs, Jamison is careful to stress the value of therapy in treating the mentally ill. Unsurprisingly, she has become a cult figure among medical students in the psychiatric department at Johns Hopkins, and a de facto adviser to those suffering from mood disorders, a not uncommon concurrence. "I often tell them, these are good illnesses to have," says Jamison. "They're terrible to experience, and unbelievably painful, but the research on the brain is going so quickly."
The emotional support Jamison has received from her own mentors is a leitmotif in her books. In her writing career, no figure looms larger than Erwin Glikes, her former editor at the Free Press, who died in 1994. Glikes, says Jamison, choosing her words deliberately, "had a really, truly, beautiful mind. He had more soul in three thoughts than most people have in a lifetime."
After Glikes published Touched by Fire, Jamison sent him the first notes toward her memoir, though she remained uncertain as to whether she should go ahead and publish at all. "He was wonderfully supportive," Jamison says. "He called me and immediately had me up to New York for breakfast, and said, 'I want to publish this, of course, but I also want to talk to you. What could I have done differently. Why didn't I know?'
"When he died, I didn't want my book anywhere. Then his widow called me and said, 'Erwin told me about your manuscript and I'd like to see it.' That was Carol Janeway. Carol turned out to be very similar to Erwin. She had the same capacity to get inside your mind, walk around and figure out what's in there, what's not in there, do it in a totally sensitive manner, a totally blunt manner and a manner you totally respect."
What began, in Jamison's words, as a series of "higgledy-piggledy quasi-essays" was gradually synthesized into a streamlined autobiography that captured not only Jamison's tumultuous past, but also, in a prose style as agile as that of Oliver Sacks, the quicksilver activity of a disorganized mind.
Night Falls Fast came to life in similar fashion, as a mass of index cards that Jamison spread on the floor of a hotel in Gloucester, Mass., and mulled over for a week as she walked on the beach. The results are a book that conveys from a personal perspective, with the utmost scientific expertise, and in a voice uniquely her own, the ordeals visited upon the suicidal mind. Perhaps that's the true legacy of Jamison's work. She has not only made the realities of mental illness accessible to the general public but, in the process, no doubt many times over, she has saved people's lives.
