A rebel Taoist speaks her mind

Jane Alexander is the author of the blog Adventures of a rebel Taoist. Today she takes on Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, whose book is widely admired by those who believe in the chemical cure.

Well, I have something to say to you Kay Redfield Jamison author of Unquiet Mind and steadfast promeds advocate. I consider the unasked-for treatment of my bipolar symptoms with psychiatric medication to be medical malpractice. The treatments you espouse so enthusiastically did nothing but poison me. When I first read your opinion in your book I wondered for a few seconds if it wasn’t possible to sue you somehow for influencing my psychiatrist and caregivers to ‘treat’ me with your horrible lithium.


I also find that you wimped out of the full scope of bipolar treatment. You took the lithium but you never took the brain damaging antipsychotics even though you admit you were ‘floridly manic’. You are missing out on the full ‘bipolar treatment experience’, doc. You don’t know what it’s like to be that patient whom you told, “You’ve been given a shot of Haldol. Everything is going to be alright.” It didn’t turn out to be all right did it?


Further in, she has the gall to blame the man’s mania on his lack of lithium. I am not joking. Page 107 “Neither the resident nor I needed to see the results of the lithium blood level that had been drawn during his admission to the emergency room. There would be no lithium in his blood. The result had been mania.”

I mean give me a break, ‘doctor’. How you can be so unscientific as to posit this man’s psychotic episode as the result of a lack of lithium, (and not some other kind of trigger, like, I don’t know, maybe… stress?) This is kind of like how a headache is the result of not having aspirin in your blood, right? Sure. Makes perfect, logical, scientific sense Kay. No. Not really.

The full rebel Taoist's dismantling of KRJ's near sainted status with the biochemical crowd can be found here.