14

Therapy

Kay Redfield Jamison is both an award-winning clinical psychologist and a world expert on the emotional extremes of bipolar disorder. She knows her subject firsthand:

For as long as I can remember, I was frighteningly, although wonderfully, beholden to moods . . . as a child, as a young girl . . . as an adolescent. . . . Caught up in the cycles of manic-depressive illness [bipolar disorder] by the time I began my professional life, I became, both by necessity and intellectual [choice], a student of moods (1995, pp. 4–5).

Jamison’s life was blessed with times of intense sensitivity and passionate energy. But like her father’s, it was at other times an emotional roller coaster. Reckless spending, racing conversation, and sleeplessness alternated with swings into “the blackest caves of the mind.”

Then, “in the midst of utter confusion,” she made a life-changing decision. Risking professional embarrassment, she made an appointment with a therapist, a psychiatrist she would visit weekly for years to come.

He kept me alive a thousand times over. He saw me through madness, despair, wonderful and terrible love affairs, disillusionments and triumphs, recurrences of illness, an almost fatal suicide attempt, the death of a man I greatly loved, and the enormous pleasures and [frustrations] of my professional life. . . . He was very tough, as well as very kind. . . . Even though he understood more than anyone how much I felt I was losing . . . by taking medication, he never [lost] sight of the overall perspective of how costly, damaging, and life threatening my illness was. . . . Although I went to him to be treated for an illness, he taught me . . . the total beholdenness of brain to mind and mind to brain (pp. 87–89).

“Psychotherapy heals,” Jamison concluded. “It makes some sense of the confusion, reins in the terrifying thoughts and feelings, returns some control and hope and possibility from it all.”

This chapter explores some of the healing options available to therapists and the people who seek their help.