Kay Redfield Jamison is the daughter of an Air Force officer and was brought up in the Washington, D.C. area and in Los Angeles. She attended UCLA as an undergraduate and as a graduate student in psychology, and she joined the faculty there in 1974. She later founded the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, which became a large teaching and research facility. 

Dr. Jamison is now Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. The textbook on manic-depressive illness that she wrote in association with Frederick Goodwin was chosen in 1990 as the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the Association of American Publishers. She is also the author of a trade book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993), and has produced three public television specials on the subject: one on manic-depressive composers, one on van Gogh, and one on Lord Byron. The recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, Dr. Jamison was a member of the first National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, as well as the clinical director for the Dana Consortium on the Genetic Basis of Manic-Depressive Illness. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a physician and scientist at the National Institutes of Health.

Books by Kay Redfield Jamison

An Unquiet Mind

by Kay Redfield Jamison

For years, Kay Redfield Jamison led a double life. An international authority on manic-depressive illness, and one of the few women who have achieved the status of full professor of medicine at an American university, Jamison was harboring a secret: she herself suffered from manic-depression. A mercurial, emotional child and adolescent, Jamison suffered her first severe attack of the disease at seventeen; a decade later, shortly after she joined the UCLA faculty, her mood swings had developed into full-blown psychosis.

Night Falls Fast

by Kay Redfield Jamison