SLIDING PAST SATURN

By Anastasia Toufexis

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON IS A world authority on manic depression. She co-wrote the definitive medical text on the disease, which is also known as bipolar disorder. She has been a valued clinician and teacher, first at the University of California, Los Angeles, and now at Johns Hopkins. As a fellow at Oxford, she pioneered research into the link between creativity and manic depression. In concerts, television programs and a lay book, Touched with Fire (1993), she has popularized that research, identifying as manic depressive such luminaries as Vincent van Gogh, Robert Schumann and Lord Byron.

But what few knew until her revelation this year is that Jamison has suffered from manic depression for more than 30 years. Now Jamison is publishing a memoir that chronicles her odyssey from painful mental chaos to an uneasy psychic peace. Written with poetic and moving sensitivity, An Unquiet Mind (Knopf; $22) is a rare and insight ful view of mental illness from inside the mind of a trained specialist.

Going public has not been easy for Jamison, 49. As a therapist, she well knows the stigma that mental frailty carries, and she worried about the effect her confession would have on her patients and colleagues. Some patients were shocked when she told them, she recalls. "They said, 'You're so normal, so Brooks Brothers. You don't look like you've had a problem in your life.'" But she was "tired of the waffling," she says. "My pro fessional life is devoted to helping people understand and accept this disease. And if a professor at Hopkins can't be open about having it, who can?''

Just as important, Jamison wanted to explore the profound influence of powerful feelings on every aspect of life, from work to friendship to love. "Moods make us who we are," she observes. "These tides work on us all the time and leave their traces for good and bad."

Signs of trouble were present for Jamison from an early age. The daughter of an Air Force meteorologist and a teacher, she was mercurially moody as a child and became severely depressed as an adolescent. At 16 she felt the first intoxicating high of mild mania. The disease quickly worsened. During her 20s she careened through increasingly florid manias and overlapping depressions. "People usually think of mania and depression existing separately," says Jamison, "but the most dangerous episodes are the ones which combine mania's racing thoughts and impulsivity with depression's despair. That's often when people try to kill themselves."

Jamison had her first psychotic breakdown just months after receiving her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA. Found to have manic depression, she was put on lithium, now a standard therapy for the condition. She responded well to the medication, but like so many other patients--and despite all her training--she stopped taking it as soon as she began to feel better. Her resistance was part denial, part side effects (the high doses used in the early '70s blurred her vision). But the core of her defiance, Jamison makes clear, was that she was addicted to the highs.

During mild mania, people with the illness are infused with energy and vision. They think faster, more clearly and with greater originality. "I could fly through star fields and slide along the rings of Saturn,'' writes Jamison of her episodes. Were it not for her disease, she says, "I would not have accomplished the same things." Nor, she maintains, would many famed artists.

That's a dangerous idea, some critics say, arguing that Jamison romanticizes the illness. She bristles at the suggestion. "It's a fact that a dis pro portionate number of artists appear to have the disease compared with the general population," she says. "Why is that so hard to stomach? If 80% of composers had thyroid disease, no one would have a hard time accepting that . And I've said over and over again that you don't have to have manic depression to be creative. In fact, most creative people don't."

With or without creativity, Jamison cautions, there is nothing glamorous about manic depression: "It's a horrible disease." In her manic phases, her restless energy helped destroy her first marriage and sent her on financially ruinous shopping sprees. Then, in her blackest despair, she tried to kill herself.

Jamison was not, in the paradoxical jargon of psychiatry, a "successful" suicide. But it took years for her to accept the fact that she had to stay on medication. What really saved her life, she says, was psychotherapy. In an age that believes drugs alone can defeat disease, Jamison remains a staunch supporter of what Freud called "the talking cure." "Lithium moderates the illness," she observes, "but therapy teaches you to live with it."

Nowadays Jamison has achieved a more settled existence. At Hopkins there is the routine of teaching, research and counseling. In Washington, at home with her second husband Dr. Richard Wyatt, a schizophrenia researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, she writes her books, sees close friends and takes long walks. But like many who have lived life at the highest pitch, Jamison finds being "normal" a "bittersweet exchange." "I know without lithium I'd be dead or insane," she says. And yet "I don't see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness."