 Kay R. Jamison |
Kay Redfield Jamison, Ph.D. is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the co-author of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness, which was chosen in 1990 as the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the American Association of Publishers, and author of Touched with Fire, An Unquiet Mind, and Night Falls Fast. She is the author or co-author of five books and more than 100 scientific articles about mood disorders, suicide, psychotherapy, and lithium. Her memoir about her own experiences with manic-depressive illness, An Unquiet Mind, was selected by The Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, and the Seattle Post Intelligencer as one of the best books of 1995. An Unquiet Mind, currently under development as a feature film, was on The New York Times bestseller list for more than five months and was translated into 15 languages. |
Her book Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, was a national bestseller, translated into 12 languages, and selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 1999.
Dr. Jamison did her undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was a National Science Foundation Research Fellow, University of California Cook Scholar, John F. Kennedy Scholar, United States Public Health Service Pre-doctoral Research Fellow, and UCLA Graduate Woman of the Year. She also studied zoology and neurophysiology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Dr. Jamison, formerly the director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, was selected at UCLA Woman of Science and has been cited as one of the "Best Doctors in the United States." She is recipient of the American Suicide Foundation Research Award, the UCLA Distinguished Alumnus Award, the UCLA Award for Creative Excellence, the Siena Medal, the Endowment Award from the Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, the Fawcett Humanitarian Award from the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association, the Steven V. Logan Award for Research into Brain Disorders from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the William Styron Award from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, and the Yale University McGovern Award for excellence in medical communication. She was selected as one of five individuals for the public television series "Great Minds of Medicine," and chosen by Time magazine as a "Hero of Medicine."
Dr. Jamison was a member of the first National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research. She is Senior Scientific Consultant to the Dana Foundation and Chair of the Genome Action Coalition, an alliance of more than 140 patient groups, pharmaceutical corporations, and biotechnology companies. She also serves on the National Committee for Basic Sciences at UCLA, and is the executive producer and writer for a series of award-winning public television specials about manic-depressive illness and the arts.