Kay Redfield Jamison

Kay Redfield Jamison's new book describes how Lowell's manic-depressive illness influenced his life and work. "His manias tended to lead him into writing a fresh kind of poetry," she says.

Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison is an authority on manic-depression, and the author of the 1993 book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, (Free Press/MacMillan). Recently Jamison disclosed her own 30-year battle with manic-depression in the new memoir, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (Knopf). Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

What does 'artistic temperament' really mean? In her new book, "Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament," Kay Jamison has studied the psychological makeup of many of our most revered artists--Byron, Tennyson, Van Gogh, Hemingway--and linked their genius to manic-depression. Jamison looks at current treatments for manic-depression, and considers their affect on a patient's ability to create. Kay Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.