An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

Author:Kay Redfield Jamison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780307498489
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-24T10:00:00+00:00

Tenure

Tenure is the closest thing to a blood sport that first-class universities can offer: it is intensely competitive, all-consuming, exciting, fast, rather brutal, and very male. Pursuing tenure in a university medical school—where clinical responsibilities are layered upon the usual ones of research and teaching—ratchets up everything by several orders of magnitude. All things considered, being a woman, a nonphysician, and a manic-depressive was not the ideal way to start down the notoriously difficult road to tenure.

Obtaining tenure was not only a matter of academic and financial security for me. I had had, within months of starting as an assistant professor, my first episode of psychotic mania. The years leading up to tenure, which extended from 1974 to 1981, consisted of more than just the usual difficulties of competing in the very energetic and aggressive world of academic medicine. They were, more important, marked by struggles to stay sane, stay alive, and to come to terms with my illness. As the years went by I became more and more determined to pull out some good from all of the pain, to try and put my illness to some use. Tenure became a time of both possibility and transformation; it also became a symbol of the stability I craved and the ultimate recognition I sought for having competed and survived in the normal world.

After I was assigned to the adult inpatient service for my first teaching and clinical responsibilities, I soon grew restless, to say nothing of finding it increasingly difficult to keep a straight face while interpreting the psychological test results of patients from the ward. Trying to make sense out of Rorschach tests, which seemed a speculative venture on a good day, often made me feel as though I might as well be reading tarot cards or discussing the alignment of the planets. This was not why I had gotten a Ph.D., and I was beginning to understand Bob Dylans lines “Twenty years of schoolin’ and they put you on the day shift.” Only it was twenty-three years, and I was still pulling a lot of night shift as well. My intellectual interests were widely and absurdly scattered during my early years on the faculty. I was, among other things, starting up a research project on hyraxes, elephants, and violence (a lingering remnant of the chancellor’s garden party); writing up findings from the LSD, marijuana, and opiate studies I had done in graduate school; contemplating a study, to be done with my brother, that would examine the economics of dam-building behavior in beavers; conducting pain research and studies of phantom breast syndrome with my colleagues in the anesthesiology department; coauthoring an undergraduate textbook on abnormal psychology; acting as co-investigator on a study of the effects of marijuana on nausea and vomiting in cancer chemotherapy patients; and trying to figure out a legitimate way to do animal behavior studies at the Los Angeles Zoo. It was too much and too diffuse. My personal interests eventually forced me to focus on what I was doing and why.

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