Riders on the Storm: Brilliance and mental illness; moods, madness and wellness

Kay Redfield Jamison is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at The Johns Hopkins Hospital at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, who catapulted to fame 25 years ago with a bestseller she wrote about her manic depression, titled “An Unquiet Mind.” Jamison “changed the way we think about moods and madness,” says her publisher, Penguin Random House Books.

Jamison is one of the foremost authorities on manic-depressive (bipolar) illness; she has also experienced it firsthand. For even while she was pursuing her career in academic medicine, In the prologue to “An Unquiet Mind,” Jamison was in a manic grip that sent her running around a parking lot at two in the morning. Later in the book, she described the world going dark when she was unable to get out of bed or make sense of the words she tried to read.

She found herself succumbing to the same exhilarating highs and catastrophic depressions that afflicted many of her patients, as her disorder launched her into ruinous spending sprees, episodes of violence, and an attempted suicide. Jamison explored bipolar illness from the dual perspectives of the healer and the healed, revealing both its terrors and the cruel allure that at times prompted her to resist taking medication.

I was working as a part-time reporter at the Kingston Whig-Standard, finishing writing my master’s thesis (“America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan” ISBN: 0612046591) at Queen’s University when Jamison’s book was first published. I was able to read an advance book review copy of “An Unquiet Mind” at the Whig back in the Summer of 1995.

Aside from being attracted to her elegant and compelling writing, I wanted to read  Jamison’s book for a much more personal reason; my grad school thesis supervisor had told us about his struggles with manic-depressive (bipolar) illness in the autumn of 1993 during a first semester afternoon seminar. I remember the day vividly. While it was a fairly typical overcast and dreary day for that time of year in the Limestone City on Lake Ontario’s north shore, my supervisor was over-dressed in what appeared to be the warmest cardigan in the world, as if he just couldn’t stay warm no matter what he wore or did. At -30°C (-41°C with the wind chill) as it is here in Thompson, Manitoba, as I write these words some 27 years later on Dec. 23, 2020, the cardigan would have been perfect: that day in Kingston so long ago it somehow looked overdone, out of place.

And it would have been just around then, as he was slowly walking around the classroom, that he told his students about how he suffered from manic-depressive (bipolar) illness. In trying to explain it, he put it this way: “I wake up every day and it’s like I’m waking up at 4 a.m. in the morning. That’s how the world looks.” You don’t have to suffer from a mental illness to immediately understand something of how the world appeared to him. Most of us, I think, have a sense of vulnerability, if we’re not blessedly asleep at that hour. Not a lot of good things are known to happen at 4 a.m. in my experience; sort or reminiscent of the dread middle of the night phone ringing with an unwelcome call jarring you out of a deep sleep for what is seldom, or ever, good news. God, grant us sunrise.

I spent the next two years trying to time my meetings and assignment schedule with my supervisor by trying to guess where he’d be in his mood cycle: despondent and depressed, more-or-less “normal,” not overly up or down (a phase that often ran for months, much longer than either his low lows or high highs lasted usually.)  

In the Summer of 1995, I was writing my thesis in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground, and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. The hall is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, who was head of mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960. That’s also when I read  Jamison’s just-published memoir, “An Unquiet Mind.” I hoped reading one professor would give me some insights into another professor, my professor. And it did.

As I read the book, I remember handing in the first draft of my thesis on a Friday afternoon. More than 100 pages. I had it back Monday morning from my supervisor with detailed handwritten notations and insightful, penetrating comments and questions. I was speechless that he found time even to read it over the weekend, much less comment with laser-like brilliant questions that clearly hadn’t occurred to me in the writing.

Flash-forward a quarter of a century. Judy Bolton-Fasman, Jamison’s granddaughter, is the arts and culture writer for JewishBoston.com. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, Cognoscenti and other venues. And her memoir, “Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets,” is forthcoming in fall 2021 from Mandel Vilar Press.

“Almost a century ago, my grandmother was forced into a frigid shower, ostensibly to calm her down during a devastating panic attack,” Bolton-Fasman wrote Nov. 30 at JewishBoston.com (https://www.jewishboston.com/and-then-unquiet-minds-in-a-quiet-time/).. She was told in no uncertain terms to ‘get a hold of herself.’ At one point, Grandma’s physician brother thought she belonged in an asylum. I picture Grandma in that shower rocking back and forth, shivering more from terror than cold.”

“My grandmother’s story came rushing back,” wrote Bolton-Fasman, as I went over my reporting for an event Dec. 7, aptly called “Unquiet Minds in a Quiet Time: Insights on Mental Health, Resilience and Community,” sponsored by the Ruderman Synagogue Inclusion Project (RSIP), a partnership between Combined Jewish Philanthropies (CJP) and the Ruderman Family Foundation, a private philanthropic foundation established and  managed by the Ruderman family, both of which are based in Boston and support synagogues “in creating communities where people of all abilities are valued equally and participate fully.”

Kay Redfield Jamison turned 74 last June. Her latest book, “Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire” was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Biography in 2018.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but beware the Ghost of Christmas Eve newsroom Baileys Irish Cream liqueur

 In response to a query, I wrote here yesterday about my usual Christmastime traditions over the years, and how some of my traditions date back many years, while others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.

While I touched on food, be it sausage meat dressing or stuffing for Jeanette’s perfectly cooked juicy Christmas turkey, Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, Christmas fruitcake, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped offerings; as well as the classic Christmas movie genre, I might well have added a few more traditions I developed over the years that festively often blended the personal and professional, private and public.

Ecclesiastes (hello Qoheleth, hello King Solomon?) had it about right, I think, when whosoever he was wrote, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In terms of the Christmas season for many that means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do. In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of our saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth-century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and it is Christmas 1996. I am working as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, during the pioneering days of Canadian online journalism. From day one, we published no print edition and our local stories in that groundbreaking digital newspaper were updated on the fly throughout the day, but there were few bells and whistles, as very, very few of our online readers had cable broadband internet in 1996. Who remembers dial-up?

On Christmas Day 1996, I was called at home by a father who read us online and wondered if we could take a few minutes to put up the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” letter to the editor and the editorial response for his young daughter.

The letter and editorial had long been in the public domain. So we did. On Christmas Day. Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote the long-ago letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

The following year at Christmas 1997, I was back in Peterborough, Ontario at the Peterborough Examiner, a print-only daily newspaper back in those days, where I had worked previously from 1985 to 1989. During my first stint, I was the court beat reporter. Now, I was the city hall reporter. The Examiner, of course, was the paper Robertson Davies edited between 1942 and 1955. It was while editing the Peterborough Examiner that Davies, considered by townspeople as an eccentric bearded figure in the small-town world of Peterborough in the 1940s, would establish himself as one of Canada’s most important 20th century literary figures with the creation and development of his Samuel Marchbanks character, mining his daily newspaper experiences in the Queen of the Kawarthas for many of the characters and situations, which would appear in his novels and plays.

On Dec. 23, 1997, I was at a dinner party hosted by the late playwright Rhonda Payne at her home on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough. I had met Rhonda, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a month earlier at Karen Hicks – at another dinner party. The National Post described Rhonda in 1999 as a “national treasure” and if ever there was a bon vivant, it was Rhonda, which is why the evening was so convivial and is perhaps what induced me to have more red wine at dinner than I might normally during the work week. You see, the Examiner had a long tradition of its own of granting employees what was quaintly termed “early leaving” at noon on both Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. What’s an extra glass, or maybe even two, of red, I thought to myself? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and really, how hard can it be? All I have to do is more or less physically show up in the newsroom for the half-day morning.

When I got home from Rhonda’s dinner party that night, the red light was flashing repeatedly and rapidly on my old General Electric answering machine (I think voicemail existed, but was still in its early years). It seemed odd to have so many messages awaiting receipt, but I went ahead and pushed the play button. Lo and behold it was Jim Hendry, then city editor of the Examiner, telling me that there was going to be a press conference at 8 a.m. Dec. 24 at the Peterborough County courthouse with City of Peterborough and County of Peterborough officials on hand to answer questions about the province seizing welfare files earlier in the day on Dec. 23. Many of the details are blurry after 22 years, but I believe welfare was perhaps a shared city-county municipal responsibility in those days, and the province was intent on upsetting that apple cart through shifting responsibilities and financial obligations between the two entities in what was called “downloading” in the days of the Harris government.

I barely survived the press conference. Once back in the second-floor newsroom of the old Peterborough Examiner building at Hunter and Water streets, I quickly picked up the telephone on my desk, across from Jack Marchen, then the court reporter, to give the late Ron Chittick, then chief administrative officer of the City of Peterborough, a quick call before he vanished for Christmas, as I realized back in the office I had a couple of unanswered questions still. Jack Marchen had been sitting across the desk from me in the newsroom when I left in August 1989 and he was still sitting across the desk from me when I returned. Phil Tyson, who sat beside me when I left, was also sitting beside me when I returned.

Time elapsed had foolishly led me to forget one of Jack’s Christmas traditions, which I should have remembered from the 1980s. But eight years had passed since then and there had been the dinner party the previous evening. Jack, unofficially, of course, and off-the-record, if anyone asks, traditionally would walk around the newsroom the morning of Christmas Eve, a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream liqueur and white Styrofoam coffee cups in hand, to pass out some Christmas cheer to his friends and colleagues.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking, but I happily accepted my coffee cup full of Baileys, as Jack handed it to me, which in all fairness kind of looked like a cup of coffee for those like myself, who go heavy on the cream. I slugged it back in one gulp, which does in retrospect seem kind of odd if I actually thought it might be hot coffee, and my brain froze instantaneously – mid-sentence, mid-question to Ron. For a thirty-second eternity, or so it seemed, there was dead air on the phone line as I failed to articulate the remainder of the question I was posing to Ron.

That, friends, was tradition and Christmas Eve 1997.

A decade later, editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News weekly newspapers here in Northern Manitoba, I resumed publishing the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter to the editor from 2007 to 2013, below a bold-faced and italicized introduction, which read:

“Editor’s note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. We, at the Thompson Citizen, are pleased to be part of that tradition and republishing it at Christmas has become an annual hallmark of the festive season for us here as well since Dec. 19, 2007. Merry Christmas, one and all.

John Barker.”

You can read it in full here at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/editorial/yes-virginia-there-is-a-santa-claus-1.1367424

While at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I also much enjoyed re-printing Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas. It opens: “My first teaching assignment was in Thompson in 1968. Mary was a student of mine. She was from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family who lived on the edge of town about a quarter mile from the town’s railway station.

“On the last day of school before Christmas holidays many of the students brought me gifts….”

The column was first published in the Grandview Exponent, which serves the communities of Grandview and Gilbert Plains in the Parkland region of Manitoba, on Dec. 20, 2005, and later republished in Garwood Robb’s blog, “In My Own Words,” which can be found online at either: http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html or https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/columnists/soundings-1.1360060

Garwood lived on Centennial Drive East in Thompson and taught at Westwood Elementary School from September 1968 to June 1972 when he moved to Winnipeg.

And while it is likely too soon to call it a tradition, I’ve become rather fond in recent years of re-posting on Facebook at least two YouTube videos: “Mog’s Christmas Calamity,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuRn2S7iPNU&feature=share) based on author and illustrator Judith Kerr’s Mog, who first appeared in the book “Mog the Forgetful Cat,” in 1970, and who falls asleep on Christmas Eve, and unwittingly creates unimaginable chaos, leading the Thomas family to fear that Christmas will have to be cancelled, and Igniter Media’s “A Social Network Christmas,” an artistic take on how the story of the nativity might have read had a social network existed at the time of Jesus’s birth, which you will find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghwe4TYY18

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22