The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

Fires in the Dark: Healing the Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison https://amzn.to/43Hcwcu The acclaimed author of An Unquiet Mind considers the age-old quest for relief from psychological pain and the role of the exceptional healer in the journey back to health. “To treat, even to cure, is not always to heal.” In this expansive cultural history of the treatment and healing of mental suffering, Kay Jamison writes about psychotherapy, what makes a great healer, and the role of imagination and memory in regenerating the mind. From the trauma of the battlefields of the twentieth century, to those who are grieving, depressed, or with otherwise unquiet minds, to her own experience with bipolar illness, Jamison demonstrates how remarkable psychotherapy and other treatments can be when done well. She argues that not only patients but doctors must be healed. She draws on the example of W.H.R. Rivers, the renowned psychiatrist who treated poet Siegfried Sassoon and other World War I soldiers, and discusses the long history of physical treatments for mental illness, as well as the ancient and modern importance of religion, ritual, and myth in healing the mind. She looks at the vital role of artists and writers, as well as exemplary figures, such as Paul Robeson, who have helped to heal us as a people. Fires in the Dark is a beautiful meditation on the quest and adventure of healing the mind, on the power of accompaniment, and the necessity for knowledge. About the Author Kay Redfield Jamison (born June 22, 1946) is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood. She holds a post of Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by the show. We've got an amazing author on the show and mind.

She's an American clinical psychologist and writer, and she's written several famous books, and she's got a new one that just came out. So we'll get into that because I need as much psychological help as you may know. You guys have been with me for 14 years and over 1,400 episodes. We're celebrating and punching out two to three new episodes a day so please refer the show to your family friends and relatives we beg of you please do it please full of a god what more do we need to give you people and we love you guys in the audience go to youtube.com for chest christmas goodreads.com

for chest christmas linkedin.com for chest christmas and we're trying to get cool on tiktok we're trying it's not working because we're, and we're trying to get cool on TikTok. We're trying. It's not working because we're old, but we're trying to be cool over there. We're working on it. As the kids say, get off my lawn. No, wait. Do old people say that? I don't know.

I think they're telling me to get off their TikTok lawn. Today, we have Kay Redfield Jamison on the show with us today. She's the author of many books, and her latest book just comes out May 23rd, 2023, Fires in the Dark, Healing the Unquiet Mind. She's on the show with us today to talk about her book and her insights and all the research she did. She is an American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has been centered on bipolar disorder, which is namely me, and which she has had since her early childhood. She holds a post of professor of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine and is an honorary professor at English at the University of St. Andrews. Welcome to the show, Kay. How are you? I'm fine. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for coming. It's an honor to have you as well. So give us your dot coms or wherever you want people to find you on the interwebs, please. I don't actually, you know, I'm not actually on, you mean social media? Anywhere. Do you have a website that you want to plug? I don't have a website. I think my publisher does.

I think I probably have one in my name, but I don't, you know. There you go. They're complicated. So, you know, people can order the book on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold. So, Kay, what motivated you on to write this latest book? Well, I'm very interested in general and psychological suffering and actually psychological strength and psychological courage. And I've written a lot about mood disorders, depression, and bipolar disorder, the latter of which I've had since I was 17.

Wow. And I've done a lot of research on it and teaching about it. But I think in this day and age that there's been not enough emphasis on the importance of psychotherapy. And I say psychotherapy with the caveat of psychotherapy well done. There's a lot of psychotherapy that's not so great, but I was very interested in tracing the origins of modern psychotherapy to the battlefields of the First World War. Oh, wow. And then way beyond that to the Greeks and the Assyrians and Babylonians. I mean, in other words, we've all had, our species has had psychological suffering since we began.

And so the question is how have various societies and cultures addressed that? And what do we do in this day and age? And how do we learn from the past, but also how do we learn from exemplars and courage and people who've handled suffering very well? Oh, there you go. You know, we have an upcoming guest on the show who wrote a book called soldiers don't go mad by charles glass i don't know if you've heard of it but it's it's

just come out and it's a about mental illness during the first world war you mentioned that so i thought that might be pertinent it was a huge problem of course i mean um the origins of a lot of our notions of trauma come from the First World War. And your massive, I think, book, An Unquiet Mind, was an incredible hit and a memoir of, I think, what I see here, of mood and madness, if I'm reading that correctly? Yes. Yeah. And it was very popular. And so is this kind of a follow-up to that book, would you say, or just an add-on of more information um i would say, journey through mania and depression and so forth,

and things that were helpful and things that were not helpful. But mostly it's about how do you deal with pain? How do you derive some advantage at the end of the suffering. I spent a lot of time with college students because the average age of bipolar illnesses is quite young. And I'm always saying to them, there's nothing good to be said for depression except at the end of it, what you pull from it and what you use from it and how you learn from it. There you go.

So tell us a little bit about your origin story. We've had a lot of people on this show that have talked about childhood trauma, how that shaped them in different things. What was your journey like through your life and dealing with some of the issues that you dealt with? Right. I would say actually I had a quite happy childhood. I was brought up in the military. My father was an Air Force pilot. And so we traveled around a lot. And there's

a lot of love and a lot of interesting posting hither and thither. So I didn't have some of the aspects of trauma that perhaps some people do. but when i was 17 i was we were living in california and i got psychotically depressed i got quite high and kind of mildly manic and then i i just became suicidally depressed and i never thought about death i never thought certainly hadn't thought, certainly hadn't thought about suicide, hadn't thought about anything like that. I was always kind of captain of my team's outgoing and loving life and

enthusiastic and whatever. And all of a sudden, all I wanted to do was die. So it was an extremely devastating time. And then as mood disorders tend to be cyclic, you know, they come and go. So it went and then it came and went until I, but not at a medical emergency sort of level. And then when I joined the faculty at UCLA in the psychiatry department as assistant professor I became psychotically manic completely uh uh deranged to say the least and so I I hadn't a choice but to get treatment and I was fortunate enough and part of my book is is relates to that is what are the aspects of good

treatment what is it that makes a really great healer uh why are some people sort of sort of okay some people are good and some people are really great and i was very very fortunate indeed to get a very good psychiatrist who is who's a very well versed in what the illness was like and the biology and the psychopharmacology but also a great humanist. So I had a wonderful combination of psychotherapy and medication. So I wrote about that in my first memoir. And then this memoir, I really tried to follow up on looking back,

what were the things that were really, you know, really, really good and really worked and what things from life. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website.

You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff, with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO. And be sure to check out chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Is finding a good psychiatrist the real key to getting better?

And I think you also have to be honest with your psychiatrist too. I mean, you can't be PR. I've seen people that have gamed psychiatrists where they PR them and they won't open up. So is the key to finding a really good psychiatrist that can carve you open and get inside your mind? Well, I think it's an interesting way of putting it sort of as a pumpkin quality test. My psychiatrist is recommending full lobotomy. So they're just going to carve the front off and have at it, hack away right well i i think certainly you know and it's easier said than done i mean the questions are one of the reasons i wrote the book was really to try and say you know these are the good

qualities and but people don't always have that luxury and we live in a utterly broken health care system so it's it's very easy to say well you don't get a really great psychiatrist, but there aren't that many of them, and most people can't afford them. But yes, in an ideal world, yes, of course, to get a really smart psychiatrist who knows what he or she is doing, really clinically competent. I mean, empathy doesn't pay the rent, just sitting around listening and nodding. If you've got bipolar or depression, that's just not going to help. But I think also that it's being accompanied. I think a great psychiatrist or psychologist accompanies people and extends hope and reason to live and endure and survive and prevail. But it's not easy. And I think being honest, you know, it's honesty both ways around. You're talking about not being honest

in terms of what you tell someone. Of course, there's no point in doing that. I mean, why waste your time and money? But I think the other side of it is you have the right to expect that your psychotherapist is really going to be honest with you. And that's terribly important. And get through to you and not put up with the sort of PR you want to do. You know, I kind of feel like in today's world, especially with social media, I need to walk around and hand out cards to psychiatrists. It seems like we need to get back to accepting this more as a level of health benefit because there's a lot of people that are mentally maladjusted. I, for one, am. I think everyone's clear on that one. But also, you know, we've got 20, you know, the COVID thing.

I think a lot of people broke over COVID. Right. Well, for sure. I mean, I think one of the few advantages of the pandemic was that people were in very close proximity to their children, for example. Oh, that'll break you. And kids will, you know, kids are able to fake it to a large extent, to talk about their problems to their friends and not their parents. But if you're not going anywhere, I think parents have an upfront chance

to see how much suffering was going on. And the fact is there's always been this suffering. I mean, psychological problems and mental illness are really common. And this is one of the things that I think has come out of this is that people appreciate, you know, I mean, psychiatrists and psychologists have known for forever, you just look at the statistics that these are common illnesses, particularly depression and anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder. These are very common. It's not like Mongo-Bizarro diseases. These are really common, and they're really common in adolescents.

So perhaps the fact that we're talking about it is a function, to some extent, of the stress of the pandemic. People went through a lot of, you know, I was suppressed during the pandemic. It was a dark time. I'm like, wow, are we going to go through another 2008 crisis? You know, everything didn't seem to be working. I lost a lot of money over it. So tease us out maybe some of the other things we haven't talked about

there in the book, if you would. Well, some of it really deals with, you know, it's hard to get well, you know, and I think this is one

of the things that we live in a world where people focus on, you know, calming themselves and all that's to the good and wellness and so forth. But the fact of the matter is there's some really tough times in life. And calmness is not necessarily going to get you through. of the things that I always appreciated about my own doctor and I focus a lot on is that you can do it, but it's hard. And once you've done it, it's all the better for having been hard

because you've really done something. And, you know, I tell students, you know, your parents can't helicopter in on this one. They can help you with getting a doctor. They can give you love and support and, you know, room and food. But at the end of the day, the pain is other people will leave the room and you will have the suffering. So the question is, how are you going to deal with that? And what are you going to bring out of that? And it is going to be difficult and so i i have always advised people to and i have a whole section on you know creating your own islands of things that um replenish you that give you sustenance that give you meaning that give you purpose because it's the purpose and the meaning um that will serve you well, ultimately.

And you really want, and I talked quite a bit about people who went through a lot of suffering, like Paul Robeson, for example, an extraordinary person who gave back, you know, and felt a very strong obligation in terms of political social advocacy and using his art in that direction. But he had a great deal of pain and suffering for a lot of reasons in his own life. And I think that somehow in this day and age, we don't look to heroes perhaps in quite the same way that we used to. As I said, I was brought up in a military family. So, you know, Chuck Ager and Billy Mitchell and those people are childhood heroes. These people have immense courage. And I think that one of the things I wanted to bring out in this book was you could look to literature, you can look to music, you can look to other people to help you get it through, not just doctors.

Wow. Now, one of the quotes from the book you have here is, to treat even to cure is not always to heal. Tell us a little bit about what that means. Well, I mean, it's pretty much, you know, you can have a severe illness and you can get treated for that illness and get well from that illness in many ways. But you don't necessarily heal. And the healing part of it is a longer term sort of thing, and it's a much more subtle sort of thing.

And I think that good doctors, whether you're talking about medical doctors or psychiatrists or psychologists or whatever, have that capacity, that ancient capacity. And one of the reasons I trace the history of psychological healing is that it goes so far back to laying on of hands, rituals, herbs, you know, dream analysis in the ancient Greek temples of healing. But people have thought about these things for a very, very long time. And confession, for example, you and Freud both said that confession from the old churches was always the core

of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. And there's a certain amount of truth in that, that you go into a therapist's office and you confide. And you trust that therapist to do well by you when you confide, to take you seriously, to understand what you say, and to be able to guide you on. Definitely. That's interesting to me i never thought about that that basically you know in the old days before a lot of uh modern psychotherapy uh maybe

going to the confession at the catholic church was a form of psychotherapy i think it certainly was i mean if you look at the the uh derivation of healers is you know their priests um the old doctors and the old priests um those that combination and i think still that you know whether you're talking about whether you're a priest or a rabbi or a minister or a psychotherapist the intelligent extension of hope is one of the first and most important tasks. You have to convince somebody in depression, for example, one of the first things that goes

is hope, by definition. That's the heart of depression. And it's one of the most killing aspects is it deprives people of hope. And to have the ability to extend hope to people is a very, very important thing. I have a colleague at Johns Hopkins, for example, who was treating a very depressed patient.

And he said, I will never, ever, ever give up on you. And there's something in that message that says, you know, I'm here. I'm not leaving you. And you will get better. There you go. There you go. Well, this is really insightful, and I think it should be amazing for people. I think more and more people, like I say, need to seek mental help.

I have people ask me, like, what if you go back and talk to talk to your 16 year old or teenage self, what would you tell it? And mine is like, get some mental help. Uh, I, I had extreme ADHD when I was young, uh, some childhood trauma and, uh, I, I would have been better for it. Sadly, you know, we don't really figure out that this is affecting us to our older ages. This has been really great to have you on and insightful. Kay, anything more you want to tease on in the book before we go? No, I'm delighted to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Thank you. Order up Kay's book wherever fine books are sold. Fires in the Dark, Healing the Unquiet Mind and all that good stuff. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, youtube.com, FortressCrispFoss, youtube.com, FortressCrispFoss, and all those places on the internet.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.