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The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness | 
 enlarge | Author: Elyn R. Saks
Publisher: Hyperion
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  61 reviews
Sales Rank: 5503
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2
ISBN: 140130138X
Dewey Decimal Number: 616.8980092
EAN: 9781401301385
ASIN: 140130138X
Publication Date: August 14, 2007
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Product Description
Elyn Saks is a success by any measure: she's an endowed professor at the prestigious University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has managed to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a "grave" prognosis -- and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her life.Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.So began Saks's long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 56 more reviews...
 An amazing woman has written an eye-opening book July 16, 2008
No review is going to do justice to this incredible book by Elyn Saks, an academic dean, tenured law school and medical school professor, psychoanalysis student, and, not incidentally, a raving (at times of stress or change) schizophrenic. For readers who assume schizophrenics live out their lives, if we can really call their bare existences lives, shackled literally by physical restraints or zombie-d by antipsychotic drugs, always perched to incite violence against themselves or others, or slinking along building walls muttering about being god and killing people with their thoughts, this is a must-read book unlike any other in the field.
More amazing than the author's current positions in the academic and psychiatric world, the author has had "florid" schizophrenia starting when she was about 8 years old, although it didn't fully appear until she was studying at Oxford U. on a Marshall scholarship. She got her BA at Vanderbilt, graduating valedictorian, and after Oxford, got her law degree at Yale. This is no mediocre woman! Her vivid and precise descriptions of her hallucinations and psychotic breaks are like nothing I have ever read before. Her incredible ability to cover up "the voices" and disorganized thoughts to enable her to progress through life more successfully than most "normal" people, is unmatched, although change and stress will still make her rave like a maniac. It takes Ms. Saks almost 20 years of failures and forced hospital commitments to finally realize she needs to take medication for her entire life. But, unlike most people with schizophrenia one is likely to meet or read about, she was helped tremendously by psychoanalysis and talk therapy, treatments that have long been thought useless with such patients.
I have never before encountered such a book nor such a person as Elyn Saks. She leads an amazing and courageous life and has published numerous academic treatises about the forced institutionalization, restraint, and medication of the mentally ill. I know there is a lot more to come from this astonishing mind.
A Deeply Moving Memoir of Schizophrenia July 14, 2008
Reviewed by Deb Gross
on 07/13/2008
Elyn Saks attended Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar, graduated Yale Law School, and is now a chaired professor of law at the University of Southern California. Saks also suffers from schizophrenia. THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD is a deeply moving story of Saks's struggle to live a full life while dealing with the trials of a chronic mental illness.
Saks employs evocative prose throughout her memoir to bring the reader into her state of mind when the disease breaks through her defenses. Her description of the onset of her symptoms at the age of eight resonates: "I think I am dissolving. I feel - my mind feels - like a sand castle with all the sand sliding away in the receding surf."
A recurring theme in THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD is the author's love-hate relationship with the medication that keeps her functional but leaves her less than her "authentic self". She also does an outstanding job of laying out the prejudices those with mental illness face, particularly when seeking treatment for physical ailments.
THE CENTER CAN NOT HOLD is an inspiring story of a woman who fought the demons of her mind and the prejudices of society to achieve great personal and professional success.
4.5 Books
The Center Can't Hold July 9, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Schizophrenia will impair the mind to where a person cannot process information clearly. Elyn has pretigous degrees from prominent universities. I think she has done this through her cultural backgound while finding therapists that built a rapport to where she can seperate a world of hallucination and delusion to root into a life of success based on reality. Her memoirs where detailed enough to keep the reader in constant struggle for her sanity. She actully demonstates real auditory halluciantion and how they are countered. She does share with the reader the onset and how this can happen to anyone. I think it is the best book about closet material that most people never realized about recovery and potential for someone living with Schizophrenia.
"Center " Takes Us Inside the Mind Having Schizophrenia July 7, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"The Center Cannot Hold" by Elyn Saks, is well written by a brilliant woman, herself a mental health comsumer. As a bonus, it is easy to read. I highly recommend it.
My son has Schizophrenia and this book helped me to understand a lot of what he experiences but cannot or will not express to others. I immediately passed the book on to other parents whose child has this illness, to expend their understanding of what he lives with.
No, our loved persons with mental illness are not lazy, nor to they deliberately ignore us nor our requests of them. They are heroes for getting through the day. Their every day struggle with Schizophrenia is unbelievable. The side effects of meds often make waking up a major accomplishment.
The author shares in detail her experiences. She tells of the alternate approach to treatment she experienced in Great Britain, having been offered choices, to medicate or not, to be hospitalized or not. Throughout her life, she has engaged in ongoing psycho therapy.
In this country treatments are forced on the person which in many cases, diminishing his/her personhood, even it we think it is for his own good. She talks us through choices, meds or not, therapy or not.
Elyn Saks is the exception,
It leavs you with a deeper understanding June 20, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
We often associate mental disorders with people who cannot function in life. Getting this insight from a person who is not only very intelligent but able to live a productive life provides the reader with a new outlook and understanding of this disruptive disorder. In addition it is well written and keeps your attention from beginning to end.
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