The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness
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- ISBN13: 9781401309442
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Product Description
Elyn Saks is a success by any measure: she’s an brilliant 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 agreed a “grave” scenario — 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, perfect 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 urgent situation room, force-fed antipsychotic tablets, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.
So started Saks’s long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of shame. 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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I establish it hilarious in the midst of a memoir about living with schizophrenia we switch to another book entirely (Huge Russ and Me) for about 31 pages. A fantastic joke, but it does feed into the misconception that schizophrenics are multiple personalities.
Yes, I have contacted the publisher and I reflect they may be aware of their production problems as they have a dedicated link for defective books.
I am not reviewing the text of this book as I don’t have anything constructive to add to the pile.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I struggled through this book. Surely Elyn would quit having so many psychotic symptoms; surely her meds would stop her symptoms; certainly she would realize that seeing an analyst was not helping with her symptoms. About two-thirds of the way through, I place it down thinking I would return it to its owner.
But, a month later when I read some positive book reviews, I selected it back up hoping to read that she was free of psychotic symptoms. As a replacement for, she continues to live inside her illness and hold onto her symptoms.
As a person with a psychotic disorder, I know that recovery from these painful symptoms is possible. And it isn’t just the meds that help one recover. The fundamental change in how I perceived and reacted to my world came from changing my thinking.
Recovery is personal to everyone and obviously Elyn’s thought of recovery is to continue living with her horrible symptoms and maintain the capacity to live a productive life. For me, I choose to find alternative ways to heal that include positive expectations for myself and the world around me.
Elyn, the center CAN hold; the center DOES hold. It’s all we have.
If you are a family tree member of a person with a psychotic disorder and you want your loved one to suffer the rest of their life, then send them to a psychoanalyst. If you truly want happiness, freedom, independence and all the wonderful things life has to offer for your family tree member, then read Jill Bolte Taylor’s, My Stroke of Insight. “Peace is just a thought away.”
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Gimmie a break! I personally know two people who have suffered from schizophrenia, and there is NO WAY they could have remembered all of this detail – right down to QUOTED DIALOGUE – when they were going through their hell.
The largest jokes of this book are the points when Saks drops belief-defying clunkers that even she knows make no sense. For example, after describing a schizophrenic hell when enrolled at Oxford in which she lost touch with reality for days, was held in a mental hospital for weeks on end, became emaciated by lack of eating, never washed, lost the power of speech, and “walked the streets of Oxford mumbling and gesticulating to myself”, Saks follows all of that up with the howler: “Surprisingly, the whole literary term went very well. I did catch up with my reading, and wrote seven papers, which impressed my tutor – at the end of the term, he wrote a very positive evaluation for my records.” AND she scored top inscription! Either standards have slipped at one of the world’s fantastic universities to the point where a raving madwoman can score top inscription, or Saks is overstating her illness; I doubt it’s the ex-.
Another eye opener is how small Saks family tree appears to care for her, aside from dumping her off on various “programs” and giving pained, winced looks as she not surprisingly fails. In one jaw-dropping passage, Saks relates that she dropped out of her studies and spent a month in a mental hospital AND HER PARENTS NEVER CAUGHT ON. Then, when they did come to visit their emaciated and clearly bonkers daughter, they take FOUR DAYS to question her if something is the matter! And they only came to visit her in England because they were visiting Paris anyway. Fantastic parents, there. These people blow thought of doting and attentive Jewish parents out of the water!
Overall, the book is well written, but there is no way Sacks could have remembered all the detail – right down to quoted dialogue – and no way she could have won scholarships, got into and then aced Oxford, and got a officially authorized degree and a degree in philosophy (while also mastering Greek enough to read the Greek classics in their original language, no less) while being as disconnected from reality and from sanity as she says she was.
My advice to Sacks is not to go on Oprah; poor O has had enough of her touted authors blow up in her face as fabrications.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Professor Elyn Saks is featured this week, August 27, 2007’s edition of People Magazine, page 123. After reading this article, I am nervous to learn more and read this much talked about memoir.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The book arrived in a reasonable amount of time, in excellent condition just as promised.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5