An Unquiet Mind Analysis

An Unquiet Mind is a memoir of the manic-depressive illness written from a dual perspective of the healer and the healed by Kay Redfield Jamison, the Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. This memoir uses vivid imagery and technically deft writing to bring life to the internal experience of those afflicted with bipolar disorder. This alone makes the memoir capable of educating even those people who might have been formerly unsympathetic to the suffering of people with mental disorders.
As a child, Jamison is intensely emotional. At age fifteen, Jamison visited St. Elizabeths Psychiatric Hospital, and was both frightened and fascinated with the eccentricity of the patients and the atmosphere. Jamison did, however, “instinctively reached out, and in an odd way understood” the pain expressed in the eyes of the patients (p. 25). Jamison recounted “everything in my world began to fall

Pseudopatients pretended to have symptoms of mental disorders and admitted to various mental hospitals. Rosenhan assumed that if pseudopatients were discovered to be normal and released from the hospitals, sanity could be distinguished from insanity and terms like “mental illness” and “manic-depressive” would be reliable. Surprisingly, all pseudopatients were admitted to the hospitals. Although the patients in the hospitals were able to “‘detect’ the pseudopatients’ sanity”, clinicians and nurses often attributed those normal behaviors to the labeled insanity (Rosenhan, p. 181). Rosenhan found “physicians are more inclined to call a healthy person sick … than a sick person healthy” (p. 181), and “behaviors that are stimulated by the environment are commonly misattributed to the patient’s disorder” (p. 182). Therefore, Rosenhan concluded the psychiatric diagnosis is not reliable, and “we cannot distinguish insanity from sanity” (p.