I read this as part of the 2021 Book Riot Read Harder challenge - for task 23, a book that demystifies a common mental illness. It was excellent. Jamison, a scientist and researcher in mood disorders, has manic depressive disorder, and so this book approaches mental health from two angles: what it's like as a patient, and what it's like to research and treat patients with the same illness. For someone who enjoys reading science as much as I do, this was the perfect book for the task.

It was also enlightening, in a number of ways. I knew very little about manic depression before this, so that's the obvious result. I did know, however, that a lot of people with chronic mental health problems such as this frequently go off their medications, to unhappy effect. I never understood why, but I did always assume there was a reason for it that I just didn't understand due to lack of first hand experience. Exploring this is one of the major themes of the book, and Jamison admits she struggled with it herself, and spent substantial periods of her life first taking (and then refusing to take) the lithium that moderated her disorder. She describes it in terms of homesickness - being homesick for the brain that she knew and had spent her life with, the brain that had given her as much (if not more than) what it had taken away. And you know, that's so understandable. We reach for the familiar, don't we, in times of trouble, and our sense of identity, of personality and the way we look at the world, is perhaps the most familiar thing of all.