She was unusually moody as a child and severely depressed as an adolescent. As a high school senior, she went through the first of what were to be many periods of great energy and feelings of being visionary and important, followed by depressing aftermaths. But it was not until a decade later that Kay Jamison learned the truth.

Shortly after receiving her Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA and accepting a job there as assistant professor of psychiatry, she had a major bout of mania, filled with hallucinations and delusions. Yet despite her academic training, she remained unaware that she was ill until a psychoanalyst she was dating bluntly told her she was manic-depressive and needed to be on lithium.

Jamison was shocked by the revelation. Abandoning her experimental studies of drugs and addiction, she began taking lithium and directing her research toward manic-depressive illness and suicide. She has since become a world authority on the disorder; a top-notch clinician and teacher, first at UCLA and then at Johns Hopkins; and a fellow at Oxford, where she investigated the link between creativity and manic depression.

After completing her 1995 book, An Unquiet Mind, in which she revealed that she was manic-depressive, Jamison stopped seeing patients. "I think patients have a right to come to your office and deal with their own problems, not with your problems or their perceptions of your problems," she explains, although she misses her practice.

Her journey to stability and success has not been easy. Like other manic-depressives, and despite her expertise, she would stop taking lithium, partly because she was addicted to the highs of mild mania. But extreme depression always followed, and after one of the more intense high-and-low cycles characteristic of the disorder, she attempted suicide and went into a coma. "It was very clear to me when I woke up that I wished I hadn't woken up, that I wished I was dead," she says. "But that if I were going to live, I had to stay on lithium."

She has done so, and now leads a tranquil life, working mostly in her Washington home, teaching at Johns Hopkins one day a week and writing a book on youth suicide. As her illness receded, Jamison at first became nostalgic for the highs it once brought on. "I could fly through the star fields and slide along the rings of Saturn," she recalls. Then, as the highs faded away, she remembers feeling only "an acute sadness" whenever she saw a real image of Saturn.

--Reported by Joanna Downer/Washington