An
Unquiet Mind, by Kay Redfield Jamison, is a memoir about one woman’s struggle with Bipolar disorder. The book definitely needs a trigger warning for suicide and grieving but if you get past that it was an extremely informative book about what it’s like to suffer from Bipolar disorder. I think anyone who has Bipolar could relate quite a bit to it and should consider reading it. The book focuses on Kay Jamison who was an imaginative and curious child with intense anger at times. However, she does not start noticing her Bipolar until later in her teens, especially when she goes to college. Kay outlines everything she went through in college such as failing grades. She ends up going on to become a psychologist and she discusses her fears about people in her field finding out about her Bipolar and her fears about losing her license because of that. Kay discusses her struggles with taking medication which is something that a lot of people with Bipolar struggle with. She is very thorough in describing her struggles with accepting treatment while being a psychologist herself, which was an interesting thing to read about because you’d think that since she treats people with the same illness she would be more open to treatment.
While I recommend the book to people who struggle with Bipolar, it did have a number of flaws. The biggest flaw the book had was that it was not written well. There were passages that didn’t seem to fit well together or sentences that didn’t flow well and it left me feeling a bit confused to the point that I would have to re-read the passage. However, the issues with the writing did not take away from the book as a whole and I think that the issues mainly came down to the fact that, just because the author was a psychologist and wrote research papers, doesn’t mean she had the skills to write a memoir. The other issue that I had with the book was that there were some passages that didn’t seem relevant and seemed like they could have been removed entirely. Towards the end of the book she was talking about some things and the whole time I was thinking about how boring it was and how it didn’t really seem pertinent to the book. It was related but I don’t think it added anything and instead it took away from the message of the book and made it seem as though it was dragging on.
Despite the issues with the book it definitely gave a message of hope for people struggling with Bipolar. The fact that this clinician struggled with Bipolar and was still successful in school, her profession and in her life, brought a sense of hope in the midst of all of the negative statistics that exist surrounding Bipolar. I know after reading the book I felt more hopeful about my diagnosis and it’s actually the first time in quite a while that I have felt hopeful. The other thing I liked about the book was how informative it was regarding Bipolar and I think that people who have family members who suffer with the illness could benefit from reading it.
Even though the book has many flaws I would still recommend it to people. It isn’t very often that you read a book by a professional clinical psychologist detailing their struggle with a mental illness. Kay even discussed in the prologue how she wasn’t sure what kind of issues she would encounter in her professional life by sharing her struggle. I think this book could help reduce the stigma surrounding Bipolar disorder and I believe that any book that has the potential to cut down stigma surrounding mental illness is worth suggesting.
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