Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison

An international authority and researcher on mood disorders, and a 2001 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, Kay Redfield Jamison has unique insight into the world of mental illness, having been there herself.

In 1995, as Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, she shocked her colleagues by going public with her own struggle with manic-depressiveness in a Washington Post article and subsequent book, An Unquiet Mind. The book became a New York Times bestseller.

Her national bestseller, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, was chosen by The New York Times as a "Notable Book of 1999."

Jamison completed her undergraduate and graduate work at UCLA, where she was a National Science Foundation Research Fellow, a John F. Kennedy Scholar, and UCLA Graduate Woman of the Year. She became Director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, was selected as one of five individuals for the PBS-TV series Great Minds of Medicine and was chosen by Time as a "Hero of Medicine." She also published the book, Touched With Fire, a groundbreaking study of manic-depression and creativity. Jamison's new book is Exuberance: The Vital Emotion (2003).

Dr. Jamison has published over 100 articles in academic journals and has authored or co-authored five books. She is co-author of the standard medical textbook on manic-depression, which was chosen in 1990 as the most outstanding book in Biomedical Sciences by the American Association of Publishers.