Kay Redfield Jamison is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood.
Background
Kay Jamison was born on June 22, 1946 in the United States of America. Jamison was born to Dr. Marshall Verdine Jamison, an officer in the Air Force, and Mary Dell Temple Jamison. Jamison’s father, and many others on his side of the family, also had bipolar disorder. As a result of Jamison’s military background, she grew up in many different places, including Florida, Puerto Rico, California, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. She has two older siblings, a brother and a sister, who are three years and half a year older, respectively. Her niece is writer Leslie Jamison. Jamison’s interest in science and medicine began at a young age, and was fostered by her parents.
Education
Jamison began her study of clinical psychology at University of California, Los Angeles in the late 1960s, receiving both Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in 1971. She continued on at UCLA, receiving a Candidate of Philosophy in 1973 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1975. She also took sabbatical leave to study zoology and neurophysiology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Career
After several years as a tenured professor at UCLA, Jamison was offered a tenured post as Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, perhaps the first time such a post had been offered to a psychologist. Jamison has given visiting lectures at a number of different institutions while maintaining her professorship at Hopkins. She was distinguished lecturer at Harvard University in 2002 and the Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford in 2003. She was Honorary President and Board Member of the Canadian Psychological Association from 2009–2010. In 2010, she was a panelist in the series of discussions on the latest research into the brain, hosted by Charlie Rose with series scientist Eric Kandel on PBS.
Achievements
Kay holds a post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.
Kay has been named one of the "Best Doctors in the United States" and was chosen by Time as a "Hero of Medicine."
Quotations:
I long ago abandoned the notion of a life without storms, or a world without dry and killing seasons. Life is too complicated, too constantly changing, to be anything but what it is. And I am, by nature, too mercurial to be anything but deeply wary of the grave unnaturalness involved in any attempt to exert too much control over essentially uncontrollable forces. There will always be propelling, disturbing elements, and they will be there until, as Lowell put it, the watch is taken from the wrist. It is, at the end of the day, the individual moments of restlessness, of bleakness, of strong persuasions and maddened enthusiasms, that inform one's life, change the nature and direction of one's work, and give final meaning and color to one's loves and friendships.
Personality
Jamison, in an interview, said she was an "exuberant" person, yet she longed for peace and tranquility; but in the end, she preferred "tumultuousness coupled to iron discipline" over leading a "stunningly boring life."
Connections
Kay was married to her first husband, Alain André Moreau, an artist, during her graduate school years. She then married Dr. Richard Wyatt in 1994; they remained married until his death in 2002. In 2010 Jamison married Dr. Thomas Traill, a cardiologist and fellow faculty member at Johns Hopkins.
