Current Events: The Center Will Not Hold: My Journey Through Madness

This is the autobiography of a gifted woman with schizophrenia whose story is nothing short of legendary. At the age of 7 or 8, Saks began suffering hallucinations and obsessive fears of being attacked. An adolescent experimentation with drugs provoked her parents to enroll her in a drug treatment program. But Saks' incredible self-control masked the fact that she was suffering from a debilitating mental illness. By the time she entered graduate school at Oxford University, her symptoms were so severe—including full-blown psychotic episodes and suicidal fantasies—that she was hospitalized. Through Oxford, law school at Yale, and a move to Los Angeles to work in the law school of the University of California, Saks struggled mightily to balance her ambitions with her illness, which was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Never wanting to concede to her mental illness, Saks founds calm and comfort in a rigorous work routine.

The author insists that the mentally ill are not inherently different from any of us. Schizophrenia favors no intellectual or social class; it can strike anyone. Saks has worked for years advocating for men and women with psychological illnesses, and she wrote this brutally honest book partly to make a public statement that no one suffering from any disorder, mental or physical, should be stigmatized.

Elyn Saks will be discussing her battle with schizophrenia and her book The Center Will Not Hold: My Journey Through Madness on Your Mental Health Talk Radio and you can also check out Your Mental Health Talk Radio Home Page for the upcoming show.