This Book Review originally appeared in Charleston City Paper, June 15, 2005

EXUBERANCE: The Passion for Life.  By Kay Redfield Jamison.  Alfred A. Knopf.  308 Pages.  $24.95.

 As a good friend of Lowcountry author Pat Conroy and former MUSC Dept. of Psychiatry chair James Ballenger, Kay Redfield Jamison has had frequent occasion to visit Charleston.  With Conroy, she has spoken on the subject of mental illness at two Spoleto Festivals.  Both Conroy and Jamison are well-spoken, well-read, and vastly knowledgeable.  Both have experienced the ravages of mental illness firsthand.  With Ballenger, Jamison has addressed an MUSC Institute of Psychiatry auditorium overflowing with physicians, patients, and those interested in both.

A world-class authority on manic-depression, also known as bipolar disorder, Jamison is co-author of the standard medical text on the subject as well as a general text on Abnormal Psychology and four highly literate best-sellers: Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, and now, Exuberance: the Passion for Life.  She is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as well as Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. 

It was at considerable personal and professional risk that in An Unquiet Mind she told her own story of a lifelong struggle with manic-depression.  Despite a wealth of information being available to us on mental illness, we are all too often quick to judge and unforgiving of those afflicted.  More, we tolerate the idea of an artist, musician, or poet on lithium far better than we tolerate the idea of a clinician on the same.

Explored by one who has experienced full blown mania, exuberance may seem dangerous terrain.  The difference between an exuberant state and one that is manic may lie in the presence or absence of judgment.  “Unchecked,” she writes, “enthusiasm runs roughshod over reason and intrudes into the private emotional territory of others, imposing, as it goes, its own energy and tempo.”  Exuberance is a powerful fuel, capable of high performance but necessitating caution.

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