Kay Redfield Jamison

Is a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins who studies bipolar disorder and has had it since adolescence, including a period in her twenties when the illness nearly killed her.

An Unquiet Mind is the memoir she published knowing it could end her clinical career, and it is precise about the seductive part, the manic periods she describes as extraordinary and would not straightforwardly give up.

Touched with Fire examines the association between mood disorders and artistic temperament without romanticising it. Her clinical textbook on manic-depressive illness, co-written with Frederick Goodwin, remains the standard reference in the field.