After having read Shoot the damn dog with great interest, I picked up another book from the same category at the bookstore. An unquiet mind is the memoir of manic-depressive Dr. Kay Jamison, who is also one of the authorities on that very mental illness, and currently a professor of psychiatry at a distinguished university.

Jamison's life has been greatly affected by her illness from, what I gather was, an early age. It is hard for someone who has only read the memoir and never actually known the person, to judge exactly from when and in what way her life first became influenced by mania and depression, but my impression from the book is that she mainly gained from the positive effects of mild mania and only briefly suffered from mild depression up and until her twenties, when the illness slowly took a turn for the worse. It almost cost her her job, relationships, economy and life in the coming decades. A life that at its low point very nearly ended with a lithium overdose when she was in her thirties.

It is a facinating book and I came back to it repeatedly to only read a couple of more pages, over and over. It is very personal, enough so that you feel that what Jamieson writes is a true account of her life and that she has not left out anything of importance. And I am impressed by her as a person, she has had a tough journey through life and she was still able to have a successful professional career. Mostly through being aware of her limitations and being upfront to those who needed to know. It's an inspiration.