Drawing a Family Tree for Bipolar Disorder

Kay Jamison discusses how she found drawing her family pedigree to be a profound experience.

Any time you kind of reduce your life to a single circle with crosshatches and an asterisk for a suicide attempt, it's a very objectifying sort of thing to do. I mean there's no question about it. And I, when I first did this in front of one of my Danish colleagues, we were drawing out our respective family trees - he had a family history that was also very saturated with manic depression - and we were sort of drawing our respective trees. It was horrifying to me to just sort of go through the exercise of doing it. On the other hand. it's very telling and I think that you find that with patients. I mean, if you interview a patient about a family history, is often an enlightening sort of thing to go through the, that exercise with them, because they will all of a sudden start putting pieces together that they had not put in the picture before. So it's both ungluing but edifying.