Kay Redfield Jamison

KAY REDFIELD JAMISON, PhD, the Dalio Professor in Mood Disorders, received her doctoral degree in clinical psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. The major focus of her work has been on the clinical phenomenology of mania and depression. She has studied the association of artistic and scientific creativity to mood, temperamental, and cognitive features of bipolar illness, as well the overlap and distinctions between positive and exuberant mood states and pathological ones. Other areas of investigation have included medication non–adherence and the psychology of suicide. She is the co–author of the standard medical text on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness. Dr. Jamison’s 1995 memoir about her struggles with manic-depressive illness, An Unquiet Mind, was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than five months and was translated into 25 languages. Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide was a national bestseller, translated into 15 languages, and selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 1999. Her book Exuberance: The Passion for Life was published in 2004, and Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir, was published in 2009.

Dr. Jamison is the recipient of many awards, including the American Suicide Foundation Research Award, the Falcone Prize for Research in Affective Illness from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Yale University McGovern Award for excellence in medical communication, and the David Mahoney Prize from Harvard University. She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees and was Distinguished Lecturer at Harvard University in 2002; the following year she was the Litchfield Lecturer at the University of Oxford. She received a MacArthur Award in 2001, which cited her original contributions to the understanding of mental illness, advocacy for the mentally ill and achievements in literature.