Kay Jamison is a clinical psychologist and writer, professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California in 1971 and Ph.D. in 1975 and she became a faculty member.
She is a famous expert on bipolar disorder and co-author of a textbook on bipolar disorder. She herself suffers from manic-depressive illness. There were cases of that illness in her family on her father’s side. She was under treatment but she attempted suicide by taking an overdose of lithium.
She is an author of such books as Touched with Fire, An Unquiet Mind, and Night Falls Fast. An Unquiet Mind is a memoir about her experiences with manic-depression and was selected by The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer as one of the best books of 1995. During her career, she received numerous awards. At the time when she was a professor at Hopkins, she was also a lecturer at a number of different institutions. In 2002 she was a distinguished lecturer at Harvard University and in 2003 Litchfield lecturer at the University of Oxford.