This is a must read! I really liked this book a lot and could resonate with a lot of it. Kay Redfield Jamison is a great author and should be read by everyone.

Engaging and insightful. A recommended purchase for collections where mental health titles are popular.

This is a thoughtful and interesting book, although not linear. It’s nicely researched, and nearly poetic in its writing. The foundation of healing healers first shouldn’t be as novel as it is, and I loved exploring the concept and its history.
Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for allowing access to a digital ARC.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC: This is a beautifully written book, but it's not linear. The NYT review calls it a "kaleidoscope"--and I found that accurate. The author, a psychology professor who has written about her bipolar illness wrote: "I set out to write about healing and wrote about healers." Jamison wrote a long introduction which to help readers understand the book. She explores healers--psychiatrists and physicians who exemplify the best of medicine, and the things that allow her to heal--literature, music, people. It isn't a straightforward exploration, but all of the various chapters are well researched and fascinating. I understand other reviewers' frustrations. I consider this book a resource, a reference and a wonderful historical exploration. Healthcare is struggling right now--psychiatrists aren't even taught psychological counseling in training and the more easily studied and shorter types of therapy are in vogue--not that they're better. Jamison starts with a quote from Paul Farmer about walking with a patient for a long time. What an ideal. The book does require some patience, but it's well rewarded. I would use it in medical education.

When I saw the author’s name on the cover, I was intrigued. I read THE UNQUIET MIND in college where I studied Psychology and cited TOUCHED WITH FIRE in graduate school where I wrote about bipolar tropes in Victorian poetry. Kay Redfield Jamison’s work features an interdisciplinary psychological-literary perspective that’s hard to come by in either field of study (I’ve done the legwork, there really isn’t much) and it was interesting to see her take that approach with a work that was more historical than literary this time. But not completely straying from the world of fiction and poetry; WHR Rivers was of course made famous in the Booker-winning REGENERATION trilogy by Pat Barker, where he also treats the poet Siegfried Sassoon, and it was fascinating to learn more about him here, as well as the figure of Paul Robeson, whose life was quite a discovery for me, and I appreciated this dive into psychiatry’s past as it was practiced in the beginning of the last century. Kay Redfield Jamison is as always a very, very fine writer, and it was a pleasure to read this book.