Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University
School of Medicine. She is co-author of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness, which was chosen in 1990 as the most outstanding
book in biomedical sciences by the American Association of Publishers, and author
of Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament.
Dr. Jamison has written over 100 scientific publications about mood disorders, suicide,
psychotherapy and lithium and has produced three public television specials on
the subjects... one on manic-depressive composers, one on Van
Gogh, and one on Lord Byron. An Unquiet Mind, which chronicles her
own experience with manic-depressive illness, received several awards as one of
the best books of 1995 and is currently under development as a feature film (Universal
Studios).
An Unquiet Mind was on the New York Times bestseller list
for five months. She is also the author of Night Falls Fast: Understanding
Suicide. Dr. Jamison is the recipient of numerous national and international
scientific awards, and in 1997 was appointed Honorary Professor of English
at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Jamison was a member of the first
National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as well
as the clinical director for the Dana Consortium on the Genetic Basis of Manic-Depressive
Illness. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a physician
and scientist at the National Institute of Health.
Jamison is the recipient of the National Mental Health Association's William
Styron Award (1995), the American Suicide Foundation Research Award (1996), the
Community Mental Health Leadership Award (1999), and a 2001 MacArthur Fellowhip
recipient.
Jamison is the daughter of an Air Force officer and was brought up in the Washington,
D.C. area and in Los Angeles. She attended UCLA as an undergraduate and as a graduate
student in psychology, and she joined the faculty there in 1974. She later founded
the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, which became a large
teaching and research facility.