Rating: 
Summary: An informative and curiously interesting book.
Review: Kay Redfield Jamison writes with a strong knowledge of the subject. In this book, she researches the question of artistic talent, creativity, and it's relationship to manic depressive illness. The facts are stunning. I was unaware that such a strong link existed, but it does make sense. Famous authors, poets, and painters are explored, and their struggle with this very debilitating disease is illuminated in these pages. Manic depressive illness is portrayed as a double edged sword, one that destroys even as it creates. Ms. Jamison researches the question of treatment, and whether or not treating/eradicating manic depressive illness does not also involve the stifling of creativity. Some famous authors are even known to have said that their suffering is a part of who they are, and without it, they could not create. The forms of treatment are also explored, and the pros and cons of Lithium and other medication discussed. This author has done her homework, and this book will inform and delight anyone interested in this subject. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five is because the statistics (though necessary) get boring.
Rating:
Summary: Who Are You To Claim You're Normal?
Review: It's long been considered a fact of life that seems to go with the territory that creative people are not only "abnormal" or "outside the mainstream"--but that many of them are just plain loopy. Doubtless, some of that kind of thinking owes a big debt to the narrowing--and often stereotypical--definitions of "normal" in American society. However, the gradual merging of biology and psychology over the last two decades shows a scientifically verifiable correlation between the "artistic temperament" and "manic-depressive illness." Want to know more about what psychological researchers have been discovering about this long-acknowledged link since the Prozac Revolution? Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins, presents as "evidence" a series of recent statistical studies of creative men and women that reveal a definite relationship between the long-ellusive and hard-to-diagnose illness and the personality traits researchers suspect are inherent in successful creative activity. While that's not anything particularly new or groundbreaking--the dry opening chapters are perhaps a little too technical for the information Jamison seeks to convey to a general audience--"Touched With Fire" may help to dispel some of the confusion among "normal" family members and friends who are often too quick to label the artists and writers among them as "messed up" or "weird" or "skitzy." Once Jamison gets down to the brass tacks and begins to present details from specific cases--Byron, Van Gogh, Melville and Woolf--the book presents a fascinating gathering of poems, notes, letters and testimonies that could shatter the idea that history's most creative people were also exceptionally well-behaved and mannerly. The fact they weren't is testimony, of course, to art's ability to sculpt an illusion around its creator, but the revelation does more than that. After all, still-murky distinctions between the artistic temperament and insanity bring up ethical questions regarding the ultimate meaning and direction of normality in America--who is to be included in the "Pantheon of the Normal" and who is to be barred at the door--but Jamison merely glosses over this area. Since social morays often change the meaning of "normality" over time--and since what we consider "normal" today was by no means "normal" 200 years ago--studies of this relationship that limit themselves to diagnostic criteria and subjective symptoms are bound to be far too limited to provide even the most superficial understanding of how creativity interacts with madness and other discomfiting developments. One of the book's quirks is that Jamison--doubtless due to scant information--limits the subject's medicinal applications to the effects of lithium on creativity and creative individuals with bipolar illness. What she doesn't tell her readers is that the discovery of Prozac and other SSRIs has advented a new age in the treatment and understanding of all forms of depression. In fact, depression seems to have distinct components in many cases that psychologists never understood until the unintended effects of Prozac revealed them. Prozac has been found to have a positive effect on obsessive/compulsive behavior, Tourette's Syndrome and even in cases that had previously been misdiagnosed as schizophrenia. Depression has been found to cut a far wider swath through the psyche than researchers have previously acknowledged--even to themselves. Furthermore, Jamison completely omits--perhaps due to a dearth of research--possible linkages between the creative activities of writers and artists that may someday be found to precipitate mania and depression. Writing and art supposedly clear the mind. What happens to the artist, poet or writer who inadvertantly clears--or, to put it into the technical vernacular, "kindles"--the mind a little too much? How do the stresses of the craft mitigate the illnesses we associate with creator/victims? How does the impression of a powerful stimuli--a trauma, drug or alchol use, or the "high" of creating a powerful poem or painting--set up patterns in psychic response and in the process of how we relate to less-powerful stimuli? Needless to say, we've got a long way to go before we completely understand manic-depressive illness and its strange tendency to appear in the psyches of creative individuals. Jamison's book might be entertaining and comforting to those of us who have to live with the disease--even if parts of it parse like a research paper--but we're only scratching the surface of something that deserves much more in-depth investigation than we've undertaken.
Rating:
Summary: A frustrating encounter with a brilliant mind
Review: This book has been recommended by many sources and I have made many attempts to read it. It is clear that Jamison brings an unusually humane and perceptive appreciation for the full experience of the person with Bipolar Disorder. However, she communicates much of her message through the biographies of "famous people"-- in order to make her point that creativity corresponds with bipolarity. At the risk of being called illiterate, I must say the names and stories she used had no meaning to me. Add to that, I am bipolar and seem to have some undiagnosed reading difficulty similar to ADHD. That made it impossible to follow her message as she would keep switching from regular paragraphs to biographical quotes, etc. I would highly recommend this book only to an avid reader with a very high tolerance for transitions in content and shifts in format. It is a good book just have in one's reference library.
Rating: 
Summary: comprehensive, compassionate, informative
Review: as a creative woman living with bipolar disorder, i found this book extremely helpful. Kay Jameson has paved the way for an insurgence of writings about manic depression that I don't thingk would have emerged without her candid account of her struggles and triumph. I have read and heartily recommend all her books!
Rating:
Summary: Great Insight, too much detail
Review: As one not far removed from the struggles faced by those with bipolar and depressive illnesses, I found, as I did with reading THE UNQUIET MIND, that Kate Jamison's insight into the issue of creative talent and mental illness is sensitive, far reaching, and compassionate. But unlike that first book, TOUCHED WITH FIRE tends more toward the academic, complete with voluminous footnotes. It was a good read, though I suspect that many will find her theorems are so laboriously supported (and documented) as to be meant for the academic world, not the lay person. It could be laborious, read cover to cover. Read this book to learn the nature and texture of mental illness, but treasure it much more than that for it's many references to our famous poets, authors and artists, complete with historical letters and quotes. Be patient, and be willing to simply skip part of a chapter to save valuable time and find yet another gem of some first hand account about an author or poet you always thought must have suffered to have the insight they do!
Rating: 
Summary: It's hard to write objectively about your own illness.
Review: Personally, I think she should have called it 'The Bell Jar Curve'
Rating: 
Summary: Not a book for people who like to think critically
Review: I chose to read this book because I have had personal experience with manic-depressive illness in a close friend of mine and have always wondered if her abilities would be less were it not for her illness. Today though, I wish I had made a different choice. As Jamison herself writes, the main purpose of the book is to show that there is a significant correlation between artistic temperament and manic-depressive illness. At least to me, this simple thesis has always seemed relatively uncontroversial and could have been addressed in a few dozen pages before moving on to more interesting issues such as, for example, what this teaches us about the nature of art and the nature of manic-depression. Instead, we get about two hundred endless pages consisting of a deluge of quotations, literal or paraphrased, from artists, researchers and philosophers rained down ad nauseam on the hapless reader with precious little critical thinking in between. Although some might argue that more data is always better than less, it seems doubtful that anyone not convinced of the artistic/manic-depression association by a few well chosen arguments will see the light because they have been force-fed extra verses from yet another romantic poet. To compound the problem, the book is completely lacking in the systematic analytical thinking that one would expect from a scientist; to give a single example, what is meant by artistic temperament is never elucidated. Considering that entire tomes are devoted to the meaning of art, a definition by context is a cavalier treatment indeed. After a brief introduction, the book begins with a catalogue of mostly descriptive quotations by various famous artists and their close ones describing mood and behavior patterns which can be recognized as fairly typical of manic-depressive illness. The reader is spared nothing; instances of depression, mania, sleep disturbances, anxiety, psychosis, drug abuse, suicidal ideation and so on are all carefully documented in a numbing drone. The book then moves on to the epidemiology which I find convincing, especially for the 40% prevalence of bipolar disorder among a sample of writers. One always wonders about various systematic effects but this is probably as good as the data are going to get. At last, the book makes an attempt to study the influence of manic-depression in artistic production and this is where it fails miserably. If we assume an association between artistic creativity and manic depression this means that either: · manic-depressive illness makes some people artistically creative, or · artistic creativity makes some people manic-depressive, or · there is an unknown trait that can make people both artistically creative and manic-depressive. But even such an elementary discussion is not readily apparent and instead we are drawn in a long winded reargumentation of the association between manic-depression and artistic production. Here I cannot resist quoting a few beginnings of paragraphs related to temporal periodicity: "Life is partitioned by time - years, months, days, minutes - into events that tend to recur..." "Rhythmic patterns and disturbances in manic-depressive illness are apparent in many ways..." "The very cyclicity (sic) of manic depressive illness constitutes a type of rhythm..." ... "Clearly everyone experiences seasons and patterns of light..." ... "Every artist and writer has his or her own pattern of moods and creative energies... " The editor should probably get a public spanking for letting such unbearable platitudes through. The book partially redeems itself with a well researched and well thought out life of Byron. Unfortunately, the level is not kept up and progressively deteriorates through subsequent short biographies and genealogies of Tennyson, Schumann, the James family, Melville, Coleridge, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Mary Shelley, Boswell, and Van Gogh. Again, the main point seems to be to support the connection between artistic creativity and manic-depression by tracing the heredity of the disease; isn't the author getting tired of rehashing this? I know I was. The last chapter is short, perhaps mercifully, but it should have been one of the longest, dealing with implications of therapies for manic-depression on artistic creativity. A dash of lithium here, a sprinkle of human genome project there, and another telephone book of artists in between and we are done, phew! This book gives the feeling of a quick job; the meandering stream-of-consciousness organization within individual sections, the near-absence of pages without either direct or paraphrased quotation, the stylistic clichés and repetitions, and the lack of analytical thinking with an author who is obviously capable of much better all point in that direction. I cannot help myself but wonder if this opus was not meant to ride on the coat-tails of the successful and probably very good Unquiet Mind with a view to sell copies to the manic-depressive patient/family/friend customer who must find comforting the notion of a connection between the disease and Greatness. It is a shame, the world is already so full of bad books that it would behoove those who can actually write good ones to take the time and effort to do so.
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating but scholarly
Review: The biographical content and thesis of this book are wonderful. However, for a lay audience it sometimes wanders into the academic arcane. At some moments, KRJ lapses into a discourse clearly meant for her professional colleagues who aren't quite up to date on either the science or history of this disorder. The rest of us just have to wait these intervals out. I recommend this book for those interested in poets and poetry, and for those who teach about them.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent book
Review: I don't think Dr. jamison did anything irresponsable here. Nor did I find her grasping at scientific straws as I've heard it implied. My sister who read the book brought up the concern that I read here several times, which is, how did Dr. Jamison know these ppl were bipolar? She never claimed absolutely that they were. She did however point out very suspicious and in my opinion serious patterns and events that matched what we now know of bipolar. The illness is not *that* hit and miss. I think the ethiccal questions she raised were important. No, every bipolar is not an artistic genius, though overall bipolars are *more* creative than non bipolars. What happens to this creativity when we cure bipolar disorder? It's a good question. And a good book. People's personal distaste for or fear of mental illness notwithstanding, any open mind will find it's not making false claims, or glorifying pain. It's just examining some questions that should be brought to light.
Rating: 
Summary: A dangerous conclusion.
Review: The best thing about Kay R. Jamison's book "Touched With Fire" is the biographical content. But the worst thing is not her contention that the handmaiden of creativity is bipolar disorder; it is her insistence that genes are responsible for the disorder. The debate has raged in my family for years. One brother, who receives Freudian counselling for what he believes is depressive illness, claims the defective gene infects our entire family. He cites as evidence books like "Touched With Fire," and the fact that an aunt has spent the majority of her life institutionalized for mental illness. Depending on the label de jour, said brother has diagnosed her psychotic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and now psychlothymic and bipolar. She was badly abused by an alcoholic husband early in her life. She retreated into a fetal position and eventually unfurled with aid of pharmaceuticals. Whether the abuse triggered a predisposition to psychosis or simply destroyed her will to live and function, is open to speculation. But to extrapolate from her tragic condition a diagnosis of defective genealogy on an entire family is a travesty that is perpetuated by pop-cult theory, exemplified by authors like Kay R. Jamison. And to argue that a great many psychiatric professionals concur with the gene theory is ad-populum falaciousness. Another anecdote will serve to illustrate the damaging potential of the gene theory. I was engaged to be married to a woman whose only brother and sister, both diagnosed manic-schizophrenic, committed suicide exactly a year apart. I told my fiance about my aunt's mental illness. My fiance did not think it a concern until somebody in my family convinced her of the then new genetic theory regarding schizophrenia. Our wedding was cancelled. Though I disagreed, I had to empathise with my fiance's decision; as a young girl in a loving family she had twice endured the worst imaginable tragedy. And I don't blame my family for their guileless concern. I do, however, take exception to a defective-gene theory based strictly on anecdotal evidence, a theory that for some unexplained reason ignores the possibility that a defective familial philosophic epistemology skews the perceptual transition to conceptual comprehension of reality in susceptible offspring. This means that for children in the tabula rasa state parents are a powerful cource of information when it comes to interpreting reality. Philosophies, namely those of the Platonic, Hegelian, Kantian variety, convey dichotomies wherein mysticism reconciles reality in lieu of empirical evidence. In particular, Kant, considered by many the modern world's most influential thinker(ad populum), teaches that reality exists only in the subjective experience of the perceiver. One of the symptoms of advanced manic depressive illness and schizophrenia is a condition known as solipsism, where the afflicted individual believes he or she is in complete control of reality, able, for instance, to will the weather to change -- reality exists only in the subective experience of the perceiver. When Kantian philosophy is given to children who are naturally credulous, they ofen suffer cognitive dissonance, dissociative disorder, and possibly depressive illness borne of difficulty reconciling reality with Kantian philosophy. When Kay lends the weight of her credentials to the gene theory, she is promoting something tantamount to reasoning that racism is genetic, which it isn't. Racism is handed down generation to for further reading, a book by Luis A. Sass, titled "Madness And Modernism -- Insanity In The Light Of Modern Art, Literature, And Thought."
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