The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

Whatever your image of an individual with schizophrenia, I am willing to bet it is not Elyn Saks. Perhaps you think of the malodorous woman who sits on a park bench mumbling to no one, her grocery cart of worldly possession at her side. Or, something closer to home: a peculiar uncle who never left your grandparents house, kept to himself, who wore a tin foil hat for “protection.” We all have our stereotypes, some reinforced by experience, others by cultural norms and expectations. As a psychiatry resident, I have had the tin-foil-hat-wearing patient, the homeless patients who live under highways. But Elyn Saks has schizophrenia, too, and she wants us to see that it doesn’t always fit the mold. Saks’s academic pedigree is one to envy. She graduated from Vanderbilt, the went on to be a Marshall Scholar at Oxford and received a Master of Letters before going to law school at Yale. Oh, and she has a doctorate in psychoanalysis, too. Now a professor at USC, she specializes in mental health law, criminal law, and children and the law. And she has schizophrenia. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness is a vivid and starkly honest look at her own mental health. While most of us will only ever witness schizophrenia from the outside looking in, Saks gives us a clearer window onto her experiences with psychosis. The prologue opens with Saks in the Yale law school library, arduously doing homework with her classmates. But what should be a diligent study sessio...
Source: Psych Central - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Book Reviews General Personal Stories Schizophrenia Elyn Saks journey through madness Living With Schizophrenia The Center Cannot Hold Source Type: news