Writing and Reading Through Grief | Kay Redfield Jamison | Big Think

Writing and Reading Through Grief

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Kay Jamison explains her willingness to discuss her husband’s last years, and how she was helped through her own grief by the work of other writers.

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Kay Redfield Jamison:

Kay Redfield Jamison is a Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she also do-directs the Mood Center. Once a manic depressive herself, she is now a prominent expert on mental health, suicide, and creativity.

Her books include Touched With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament; An Unquiet Mind; Exuberance: A Passion For Life; and Nothing Was The Same.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: Was it difficult to write the story of your husband’s death?

Key Redfield Jamison: It was by orders of magnitude the hardest thing I've written. An Unquiet Mind wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it. With An Unquiet Mind it was extremely hard to decide to write it; there were a lot of things that made it difficult to go public and that was very anxiety-producing. But writing the book that I wrote now, nothing was the same. It was difficult, it was really hard. It was hard writing and it was hard to decide to write it, but it was necessary.

Question: Why was it a necessary book to write?

Key Redfield Jamison: I think because I had written An Unquiet Mind, it was -- that book I saw very much as a combination of advocacy and for mental illness but also trying to describe what the experience of bipolar illness was like. In my experience, with my own family, even though my mother's deeply empathetic, wonderful woman, she had no way of conceptualizing what mania was; for example, what I felt like when I was manic or suicidally depressed. So it was a descriptive book and with this book, with Nothing Was The Same, this was really I think more along the lines of an elegy which is a very, very different sort of thing. With writing memoir about mental illness there have been a lot of memoirs in the last ten years, 15 years, but elegies have a history of thousands of years.

It's a wonderful aspect of grief that it is so much a part of the human condition, that it is so universal, that people have written about it. So it's a very different kind of writing, it's a very different kind of thinking.

Question: What’s the difference between depression and grief?

Key Redfield Jamison: I mean, in some cases, some people do get depressed in the middle of their grief and they really need to be treated for depression. But what I wanted to do was make the distinction as many people have is that grief is fundamentally a healthy sort of thing; it's human, it's not a disease, it's nothing you want to medicalize. You don't want to treat it away, you don't want people to suffer unnecessarily, but you certainly don't want to take away the experience of that kind of re-establishment of a relationship.

And depression, the experience is unremitting for the most part. I mean, it's not like you don't get very much of a break from depression. Grief is different. Grief is much more tidal; it comes and goes. Anybody who has grieved knows and will describe that just being swept by a wave of grief. You think that you're over it, you think you're to the other side, and then all of the sudden you get blindsided by a wave of grief and each one of those waves of grief I am convinced serves a good function in the mind and heart, in the terms of forcing you to have to see somebody in a slightly different light. Each time is a slightly less painful.

Depression is just unremitting, it is much more disruptive of sleep, it's -- you're much more likely to be impaired intellectually with depression. It just goes on and on and people think about suicide. Grief is -- can respond to the environment.

It can respond to solace. One of the things that's pretty interesting is that literature does help. I think that when you're depressed, you can't concentrate long enough and well enough to read for the most part; some people can, but by and large people -- that's one of the first things that goes, is the capacity to read meaningful literature. With grief, that's true. For awhile you can't read, but then you really are **** solace. From friends, from family, from colleagues, from the rights of church, whatever it is, music, poetry, and in my case, I turned more to literature and I found it immensely helpful.

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