Kay Redfield Jamison
Kay Redfield Jamison is the daughter of an Air Force officer and was
brought up in the Washington, D.C., area and in Los Angeles. She attended UCLA as
an undergraduate and as a graduate student in psychology, and she joined the
medical school faculty there in 1974. She later founded the UCLA Affective
Disorders Clinic, which has treated thousands of patients for depression and
manic-depression.
Dr. Jamison is now Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine. The textbook on manic-depressive illness
that she wrote in association with Dr. Frederick Goodwin was chosen in 1990 as
the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the Association of American
Publishers. She is also the author of a trade book, Touched with Fire:
Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993), and has
produced three public television specials on the subject: one on manic-depressive
composers, one on Vincent van Gogh, and one on Lord Byron.
The recipient of
numerous national and international scientific awards, Dr. Jamison was a member
of the first National Advisory Council for Human Genome Research, and is
currently the clinical director for the Dana Consortium on the Genetic Basis of
Manic-Depressive Illness.
She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband,
Dr. Richard Wyatt, a physician and scientist at the National Institutes of
Health.
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