![]() Jamison's condition has been about as severe as is possible in someone still capable of holding down a senior medical position (currently professor of psychiatry at John Hopkins University in Baltimore). A psychiatrist who has suffered from the illness for most of her life, she prefers the term manic depression because it is both more expressive of her experience and, ultimately, more clinically accurate. ![]() She was not afraid of admitting that she herself suffered episodes of "madness" – nor did she feel the need to be de-stigmatised by politically correct terminology. Jamison, writing in the mid-90s, says she felt personally affronted by the term "bipolar". ![]() Is depression really "unipolar" while manic depression is "bipolar"? Such classifications presuppose, she writes, "a distinction between depression and manic-depressive illness – both clinically and etiologically – that is not always clear, or supported by science". In fact, argues Kay Redfield Jamison in An Unquiet Mind, the newer name may be the less precise. T he cultural and medical shift that changed the meaningfully descriptive term "manic depression" into the quasi-mechanistic "bipolar disorder" did nothing to make our understanding of mental illness more precise. ![]()
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