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for
Vivien
Touched
With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament 
by Kay Redfield Jamison, Free Press, 1996
From the author of the New York Times bestseller, An Unquiet
Mind, Touched with Fire is an authoritative look at the
relationship between manic-depressive illness and the artistic temperament.
Psychiatrist Jamison advocates a restrained, humanistic approach to
treatment that does not "cure" the disorder at the expense of artistic
inspiration.
Amazon.com
The march of science in explaining human nature continues. In Touched
With Fire, Jamison marshals a tremendous amount of evidence for the
proposition that most artistic geniuses were (and are) manic depressives.
This is a book of interest to scientists, psychologists, and artists
struggling with the age-old question of whether psychological suffering
is an essential component of artistic creativity. Anyone reading this
book closely will be forced to conclude that it is. Very Highly Recommended.
Robert Bernard Martin, author of Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart
Dr. Jamison roams with an ease unusual in a scientist over the works
of the great poets, showing how many of them were deeply manic-depressive.
By the end of the book the reader has quietly been rerouted to the
profoundly ethical question of whether the eradication of this disease
by modern molecular biology would not ultimately be a diminution of
the human race. No final answer is given to this disturbing question,
but the book is made more convincing by its deliberately low-key approach
to the problem.
From Kirkus Reviews , February 1, 1993
Study of manic depression and inspiration that for many will be a
hard read but that makes its points convincingly--if only fragmentarily--chapter
by chapter. The relation between madness and genius is a fascinating
subject, and Jamison (Psychiatry/Johns Hopkins University School of
Medicine) has a rich lode of firsthand observers to quote from: Byron,
Coleridge, van Gogh, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Theodore
Roethke, Virginia Woolf, and many more, all of whom offer spellbinding
words about their bouts with manic depression (paranoia and schizophrenia
aren't covered). The basic argument here is ``not that all writers
and artists are depressed, suicidal, or manic. It is, rather, that
a greatly disproportionate number of them are; that the manic-depressive
and artistic temperaments are, in many ways, overlapping ones; and
that the two temperaments are causally related to one another.'' Genealogical
studies of famed manic depressives show a definite genetic linkage,
which is complemented by a seasonal one: Jamison includes seasonal
tables of mood disorders, fluctuating productivity (``winter depression...summer
hypomanias''), and peak times for suicide. Lithium and newer drugs,
she explains, often dampen creative highs while relieving victims
of turmoil and suicidal lows, but calm periods at optimum serum blood
levels may allow longer, more productive periods of creativity. Some
sufferers, however, choose to go with the lows for the rewards of
the hypomanic state when it returns (hypomania is a middling state
that gives a rich lift before the hyperactivity of mania or the colossal
bleakness of melancholia). Jamison also finds a high incidence of
manic depression among substance abusers, although she doesn't study
the incidence of illness among abstinent drinkers or drug-abusers.
Clear writing and research, but heavily clinical
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