Mood Disorder Expert to Speak at Williams
WILLIAMSTOWN — One of the world's foremost authorities on mood disorders, Kay Redfield Jamison, will speak on "Personal and Professional Perspectives on Mental Illness" at Williams College on Wednesday, April 9.The event will take place at 7:30 p.m. in Chapin Hall.
Jamison is professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Medical School and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. She is the co-author of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness, which was chosen as the Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Sciences by the American Association of Publishers in 1990.
She is also author of "An Unquiet Mind," her memoir about her experiences with manic-depressive illness. "An Unquiet Mind" was on The New York Times best seller list for more than five months and translated into 20 languages.
Jamison is the recipient of the National Mental Health Association's William Styron Award, the American Suicide Foundation Research Award, the Community Mental Health Leadership Award, and was a 2001 MacArthur Fellowship recipient.
Formerly the director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic, she has been cited as one of the "Best Doctors in the United States." She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees, 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."
Her other publications include "Exuberance: The Passion for Life" and "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide." "Touched with Fire: Manic- Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament" is one of Jamison's most intriguing publications. She investigates the lives of artists like Van Gogh, Byron, and Virginia Woolf to suggest that most prominent artists are manic-depressives and investigate the connection between the illness and genius.
Jamison received her doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Los Angeles. She also studied zoology and neurophysiology at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Free and open to the public, this lecture is the culminating event of the three-day program "Mental Health Matters: Reducing Stress, Distress, and Stigma at Williams" and is sponsored by Psychological Counseling Services, the Lecture Committee and the chaplain's office, with a number of other Williams organizations.
For more information contact John.A.Miner@williams.edu or mwood@williams.edu.
