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The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Hardcover – August 14, 2007
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Elyn R. Saks is an esteemed professor, lawyer, and psychiatrist and is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, Psychiatry, and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School, yet she has suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, and still has ongoing major episodes of the illness.
The Center Cannot Hold is the eloquent, moving story of Elyn's life, from the first time that she heard voices speaking to her as a young teenager, to attempted suicides in college, through learning to live on her own as an adult in an often terrifying world. Saks discusses frankly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, the voices in her head telling her to kill herself (and to harm others), as well as the incredibly difficult obstacles she overcame to become a highly respected professional. This beautifully written memoir is destined to become a classic in its genre.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGrand Central Publishing
- Publication dateAugust 14, 2007
- Grade level8 and up
- Reading age13 years and up
- Dimensions5.5 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-10140130138X
- ISBN-13978-1401301385
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THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD
By Elyn R. SaksHyperion
Copyright © 2007 Elyn R. SaksAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4013-0138-5
Chapter One
When I was a little girl, I woke up almost every morning to a sunny day, a wide clear sky, and the blue green waves of the Atlantic Ocean nearby. This was Miami in the fifties and the early sixties-before Disney World, before the restored Deco fabulousness of South Beach, back when the Cuban "invasion" was still a few hundred frightened people in makeshift boats, not a seismic cultural shift. Mostly, Miami was where chilled New Yorkers fled in the winter, where my East Coast parents had come (separately) after World War II, and where they met on my mother's first day of college at the University of Florida in Gainesville.Every family has its myths, the talisman stories that weave us one to the other, husband to wife, parents to child, siblings to one another. Ethnicities, favorite foods, the scrapbooks or the wooden trunk in the attic, or that time that Grandmother said that thing, or when Uncle Fred went off to war and came back with ... For us, my brothers and me, the first story we were told was that my parents fell in love at first sight.
My dad was tall and smart and worked to keep a trim physique. My mother was tall, too, and also smart and pretty, with dark curly hair and an outgoing personality. Soon after they met, my father went off to law school, where he excelled. Their subsequent marriage produced three children: me, my brother Warren a year-and-a-half later, then Kevin three-and-a-half years after that.
We lived in suburban North Miami, in a low-slung house with a fence around it and a yard with a kumquat tree, a mango tree, and red hibiscus. And a whole series of dogs. The first one kept burying our shoes; the second one harassed the neighbors. Finally, with the third, a fat little dachshund named Rudy, we had a keeper; he was still with my parents when I went off to college.
When my brothers and I were growing up, my parents had a weekend policy: Saturday belonged to them (for time spent together, or a night out with their friends, dancing and dining at a local nightclub); Sundays belonged to the kids. We'd often start that day all piled up in their big bed together, snuggling and tickling and laughing. Later in the day, perhaps we'd go to Greynolds Park or the Everglades, or the Miami Zoo, or roller skating. We went to the beach a lot, too; my dad loved sports and taught us all how to play the activity du jour. When I was twelve, we moved to a bigger house, this one with a swimming pool, and we all played together there, too. Sometimes we'd take the power boat out and water-ski, then have lunch on a small island not far from shore.
We mostly watched television in a bunch as well-The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Leave It to Beaver, Rawhide, all the other cowboy shows. Ed Sullivan and Disney on Sunday nights. When the Perry Mason reruns began, I saw them every day after school, amazed that Perry not only defended people but also managed to solve all the crimes. We watched Saturday Night Live together, gathered in the living room, eating Oreos and potato chips until my parents blew the health whistle and switched us to fruit and yogurt and salads.
There was always a lot of music around the house. My dad in particular was a jazz fan, explaining to us that when he was young, claiming a fondness for jazz had been considered fairly rebellious. My record collection overlapped with Warren's-The Beatles, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Janis Joplin. We drew the line at the Monkees (I liked them, he absolutely didn't), and he teased me mercilessly about the poster of Peter Noone from Herman's Hermits up on my bedroom wall.
And there were movies, which my parents attempted to supervise by appropriateness: Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were OK for me, but one James Bond movie (I don't remember which one now, except it was Sean Connery) caused a battle royal with my dad: I wasn't yet seventeen, and Bond, with his martinis and his bikini-clad girlfriends, was out of bounds.
For a while in high school, I worked at a candy counter at a local movie house-"Would you also like a Coke with that?"-which meant I saw every movie I wanted to see, and many of them more than once; I think I saw Billy Jack more than a couple dozen times. It didn't take long, though, to decide that I didn't like movies that were scary or tension-filled-horror movies were out, and Clint Eastwood's Play Misty for Me, with its crazy woman stalker, freaked me out for weeks. When the theater manager was robbed after closing one night, my parents made me quit the job.
I confess to an energetic sibling rivalry with Warren. As the oldest, I did my best to stay ahead of him, working to excel at things a younger brother couldn't yet do. I learned to ride my bike first. Once he was riding one, too, I simply rode mine faster and farther. I water-skied first, and then more furiously than he did. I got good grades and made sure he knew it; he worked just as hard and made the grades, too. Dad was not a praiser (he thought it would invite the evil eye), so he never complimented anyone. But Mom did, and Warren and I competed for her attention.
As for Kevin, there were enough years between us that for a long time I thought of him as my child. One of my earliest, clearest memories is when he began to crawl, and how thrilled I was about that, to see him learn to make his way from one place to the other. Not only was he younger than Warren and I, he was intrinsically more sociable, too-easier to get along with and more interested in just hanging around with us rather than competing with us.
As somewhat observant Jews, we went to Temple and observed the High Holy Days. We kids were sent to Hebrew school, and we also made our Bat and Bar Mitzvahs. Although it was never spoken in so many words, I was somehow given to understand that in many places and circumstances, Jewish people were not very popular, and one needed to be both discreet and respectable in order to make one's way in life. We didn't keep kosher (although my father's parents did); another part of the mom-and-dad myth was that in order to impress her future in-laws with how observant she was, my mother-whose family had never kept kosher and didn't really know the rules-had misguidedly ordered lobster on the evening my father introduced his parents to her.
On the face of it, then, our family life was congenial-a Norman Rockwell magazine cover or a gentle fifties sitcom. Indeed, my mother was what today would be called a stay-at-home mom. She was there when we came home from school and always made sure we had a snack-to this day, cold cereal is my comfort food of choice. Our family ate its meals together, and although my mother didn't cook much (a housekeeper did, and in time, my father took it up, and excelled at it), there was always cake in the pantry (albeit store-bought), fresh fruit in the fridge, and clean laundry in our closets.
Under that pleasant surface, however, things were more complex, as family matters inevitably are. Like all parents, mine had their strengths and their weaknesses. They were profoundly close to each other; in fact, they've always enjoyed being with each other more than they like being with anyone else, including, sometimes, their children. In the style of many 1950s couples, they seemed not to exist in any way independent of each other. My mother was always very physically affectionate with my dad in public; he was less so with her, but never dismissive or rude. It was just always clear that he was the boss. For my mother, it was always "Anything you want, dear," just as it had been for her mother. If she'd had any particular professional ambition when she went off to college, I've never known what it was, although she was a central part of a successful antiques business she and my father started together. Still, nothing's changed much in their dynamic in the intervening years. Recently, my mother announced that she'd given up her own political opinions in order to share my father's.
For his part, in spite of a sense of humor that often verged on the bawdy, my father could be quite absolute in his opinions and reactions. There was also a touch of suspiciousness in his interactions with others, particularly when the subject at hand was money. In this, he was just as his own father had been.
My parents were both outspoken in their disgust for religious or racial bigotry. For example, we could swear all we wanted, but the use of racial or ethnic slurs was utterly and always forbidden. As provincial as Miami seemed back in those days (my father often said that it had all the disadvantages of a big city and none of the advantages), the tension between the city's African-Americans and Cuban immigrants, and the riots in 1970 (during which our African-American housekeeper was harassed by the police), taught us that even a familiar landscape could turn violent and unpredictable in the fog of prejudice.
Whatever their faults (or ours), there was no shortage of "I love you's" from my parents when I was a child, nor is there one now; to this day, they're openly affectionate with all of us, and even my friends are greeted with a hug and a kiss. My parents were never cruel or punitive, and never physical in the ways they disciplined us; they simply made it known from our earliest days that they had high expectations for our behavior, and when we missed the bar, they brought us up short.
Nor did we ever want for anything material. My family was solidly in the middle class, and as time went on, our means increased. My father's law practice dealt primarily with real estate, land deals, and some personal/estate planning, all of which expanded as Miami itself did. When I was thirteen, my parents opened a small antiques and collectibles shop a five-minute trip from our house. It, too, thrived, and they began to collect and sell items from Europe, which in time meant two or three trips to France each year and a lot of time spent in New York City as well.
So there were never any concerns about having a nice place to live, or good food to eat, or missing our yearly family vacation. It was expected that we would attend college; it was a given that our parents would pay for it. They were loving, hardworking, comfortably ambitious (for themselves and for their children), and more often than not, kind. To borrow a phrase from the psychological literature, they were "good enough"-and they raised three decent children, no easy feat in that or any age. My brothers grew up into fine men; Warren is a trader on Wall Street, and Kevin is a civil engineer in Miami. Both are accomplished in their professions, with wives and children they love and who love them in return. And my own penchant for hard work and my drive to succeed is traceable directly, I know, to my parents.
In short, they gave me and taught me what I needed to make the most of my talents and strengths. And (although I couldn't have predicted or understood back then how vitally important this would be to my life) they gave me what I needed to survive.
* * *
When I was about eight, I suddenly needed to do things a little differently than my parents would have wished me to do them. I developed, for loss of a better word, a few little quirks. For instance, sometimes I couldn't leave my room unless my shoes were all lined up in my closet. Or beside my bed. Some nights, I couldn't shut off my bedroom light until the books on my shelves were organized just so. Sometimes, when washing my hands, I had to wash them a second time, then a third time. None of this got in the way of whatever it was I was supposed to be doing-I made it to school, I made it to meals, I went out to play. But it all required a certain preparation, a certain ... precaution. Because it was imperative that I do it. It simply was. And it taxed the patience of anybody who was standing outside the bedroom door or the bathroom door waiting for me. "Elyn, come on, we're going to be late!" Or "You're going to miss the bus!" Or "You were sent to bed forty minutes ago!"
"I know, I know," I replied, "but I just have to do this one more thing and then everything will all be OK."
Not long after the little quirks became part of my life, they were joined by nights filled with terror, which came in spite of all the precautionary organizing and straightening. Not every night, but often enough to make bedtime something I didn't welcome. The lights would go out and suddenly it was darker in my room then I could bear. It didn't matter (if I could just ignore the sound of my heart thudding) that I could hear my parents' voices down the hallway; it didn't help to remember that my dad was big and strong and brave and fearless. I knew there was someone just outside the window, just waiting for the right moment, when we were all sleeping, with no one left on guard. Will the man break in? What will he do? Will he kill us all?
After the first three or four nights of this, I finally drummed up whatever courage I had left and told my mother about it. "I think somebody has been outside my window," I said in a very small and shaky voice. "In the yard. Waiting for you and Daddy to go to sleep at night, so he can come in and get us. Or hurt us. You have to find somebody to make him go away. Do you think we should call a policeman?"
The expression on her face was so kind that it made it hard for me to look directly into her eyes. "Oh, buby"-her term of endearment for me-"there's nobody out there, there's nobody in the bushes. There's nobody who would hurt us. It's in your imagination. Hmmmm, maybe we shouldn't have so many stories before bed. Or maybe we're eating dinner too late, and it's your tummy playing tricks on your brain. Don't be silly now." As far as she was concerned, that was the end of it.
I tried to believe her, I really did. And I fessed up to my fear to my brother Warren when the two of us were at home alone, and we tried our best to reassure each other-together, we'd muster up our courage to go see if someone was indeed standing just outside the front door. And of course, no one ever was. But my feelings didn't go away, and for a long time, falling asleep felt like sliding into a place of helplessness. I fought it every night, my head under the blankets, until finally, sheer exhaustion and a tired growing body just took me under.
I am seven, or eight, standing in the cluttered living room of our comfortable house, looking out at the sunny day.
"Dad, can we go out to the cabana for a swim?"
He snaps at me, "I told you I have work to do, Elyn, and anyway it might rain. How many times do I have to tell you the same thing? Don't you ever listen?"
My heart sinks at the tone of his voice: I've disappointed him.
And then something odd happens. My awareness (of myself, of him, of the room, of the physical reality around and beyond us) instantly grows fuzzy. Or wobbly. I think I am dissolving. I feel-my mind feels-like a sand castle with all the sand sliding away in the receding surf. What's happening to me? This is scary, please let it be over! I think maybe if I stand very still and quiet, it will stop.
This experience is much harder, and weirder, to describe than extreme fear or terror. Most people know what it is like to be seriously afraid. If they haven't felt it themselves, they've at least seen a movie, or read a book, or talked to a frightened friend-they can at least imagine it. But explaining what I've come to call "disorganization" is a different challenge altogether. Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One's center gives way. The center cannot hold. The "me" becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. There is no longer a sturdy vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what's happening. No core holds things together, providing the lens through which to see the world, to make judgments and comprehend risk. Random moments of time follow one another. Sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings don't go together. No organizing principle takes successive moments in time and puts them together in a coherent way from which sense can be made. And it's all taking place in slow motion.
Of course, my dad didn't notice what had happened, since it was all happening inside me. And as frightened as I was at that moment, I intuitively knew this was something I needed to hide from him, and from anyone else as well. That intuition-that there was a secret I had to keep-as well as the other masking skills that I learned to use to manage my disease, came to be central components of my experience of schizophrenia.
One early evening, when I was about ten, everyone else was out of the house for a while, and for some reason I can't recall now, I was there all alone, waiting for them to come home. One minute it was sunset; the next, it was dark outside. Where was everybody? They said they'd be back by now ... Suddenly, I was absolutely sure I heard someone breaking in. Actually, it wasn't so much a sound as a certainty, some kind of awareness. A threat.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE CENTER CANNOT HOLDby Elyn R. Saks Copyright © 2007 by Elyn R. Saks. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Grand Central Publishing; 1st edition (August 14, 2007)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 140130138X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1401301385
- Reading age : 13 years and up
- Grade level : 8 and up
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #86,905 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #19 in Schizophrenia (Books)
- #363 in Popular Psychology Pathologies
- #2,698 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Elyn R. Saks is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School and a research clinical associate at the Los Angeles Psychiatric Society and Institute. She is the author of Jekyll on Trial: Multiple Personality Disorder and Criminal Law and Interpreting Interpretation: The Limits of Hermeneutic Psychoanalysis.
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Customers find the book insightful and inspiring, providing a unique look into the author's experiences. They describe it as an engaging and well-written memoir that is worth reading. Readers praise the author's courage and honesty in disclosing her journey. The story is described as gripping and interesting. Customers appreciate the author's honesty, truthfulness, and enduring strength.
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Customers find the book provides insightful and compelling information about schizophrenia. They appreciate the author's honest account of her life journey and how she navigates disruptive psychotic episodes. The topic is interesting and the author's ability to navigate the disorder effectively is praised.
"...This book can teach all of us to be more sensible and solidary to mental ill people, but it is a distressful reading, because we suffer together..." Read more
"...Overall this book is a captivating and compelling story of one woman's journey to happiness and success...." Read more
"I really enjoyed reading this memoir. It gave a real and candid glimpse into the condition of Schizophrenia and detailed how the author overcame the..." Read more
"...To make a long story short, I think this is a great book with a lot of insight." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They say it's a good memoir for anyone struggling with psychotic illness and worth reading. The author provides a candid glimpse into schizophrenia and her accomplishments are top-notch.
"Well, I think this book is maybe the best book that I read in my whole life...." Read more
"I really enjoyed reading this memoir. It gave a real and candid glimpse into the condition of Schizophrenia and detailed how the author overcame the..." Read more
"...This is a book about living with schizophrenia, and it is a great book, remarkable in many respects...." Read more
"...Her accomplishments are objectively top notch. Yale Law is impossible to get into, for instance, and she was 99% in the Law Boards...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and well-written. They appreciate the author's skill and transparency in writing about her thoughts and personal experiences. The book is described as an informative yet conversational read that allows readers to feel connected to the author's perspective.
"...emphasis is welcome and is not a sign of poor writing, but of good writing abilities...." Read more
"...Obviously she has a brilliant mind to remember with such clarity...." Read more
"...I appreciate how the author did not hold back, and painted how intense and frightening psychosis can be, and how even more frightening and..." Read more
"...This book was a joy to read, but it was also incredibly hard...." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's courage and honesty in sharing her journey. They find the book an interesting memoir of human persistence and achievement. The author bares her vulnerabilities and reveals her pure heart.
"...at how creative a writer Elyn R. Saks is and how she remembers precises details of her life, even down to conversations she had with numerous people...." Read more
"...I cannot express my gratitude towards this courageous author for sharing her experience. I could not have found this book at a better time...." Read more
"...I highly recommend this courageous and brilliant memoir." Read more
"...I was moved by her courage, inspired by her tenacity and brilliance and uplifted by her loving community...." Read more
Customers find the story engaging and interesting. They describe it as gripping, gratifying, and memorable. The author's writing style captures readers from the beginning and allows them to witness the journey.
"...Overall this book is a captivating and compelling story of one woman's journey to happiness and success...." Read more
"...The book read quick and was gripping along the way, going from normal moments of life at an Ivy League school to stark moments of disoriented..." Read more
"...read many other mental health memoirs before, but I must say this book was MOVING. Seriously...." Read more
"...book, but just following her on that journey was very absorbing and gratifying...." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's honesty. They find the memoir candid and genuine, providing an intimate look into her life. The account is believable, frank, and insightful. Readers describe it as a first-hand self-portrait that provides a vivid picture of what life is like.
"...For those who had issues with this honest, heart-wrenching story, I pray that you never have to experience how a loved one suffers with this disease..." Read more
"At times you think you’re reading Stephen King, but everything in it is real. It’ll really make you rethink our treatment of the mentally I’ll." Read more
"What an amazing, honest, brave, and inspiring account of one woman's life journey - her struggle with her mental illness and the process she went..." Read more
"...The book is an honest, clearly-written and compelling look into the experience of schizophrenia. And what's especially affecting..." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's strength and determination. They find her stubbornness and intelligence admirable. The book is described as well-written and received in good condition.
"...I appreciate her fighting for her life and continuing to fight despite all odds. She give me renewed courage. Thanks for sharing your journey." Read more
"...Carthy Awardee, which is a fitting honor for this monumental yet fragile woman...." Read more
"...Her stubbornness and intelligence were great assets. It was a very hopeful well-written description of one woman’s experience." Read more
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Customers have different views on the book. Some find it thought-provoking and humorous, while others describe it as depressing and boring. The story of pain, perseverance, and success resonates with some readers while raising issues about how we treat others.
"...As I finished this book I was so glad I had read it. The ending is profound and when Elyn R. Saks comes to terms with her illness you will feel a..." Read more
"...It's a cliff hanger until the end and throughout the book I wondered "Will she be able to meet this challenge too?..." Read more
"...be more sensible and solidary to mental ill people, but it is a distressful reading, because we suffer together with the author, chapter after..." Read more
"...brilliant mind, and only such a person can write a work so sincere, humane, and profound as The Center Cannot Hold...." Read more
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Brain seizure, broken brain, head attack, biological dysfunction
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2012Well, I think this book is maybe the best book that I read in my whole life. Besides tell us the story of her life, Elyn Saks tell us what a person suffering from schizophrenia thinks and feels during her crisis. Off course that each person is different, but to "healthy" people, know about this is a invaluable knowledge. I was very surprised when she describes that she was shamed because while she was tied during a crisis, in the hospital, the door was open and all people that passed in front that door can see her. Usually we think that mental patients do not completely realize the reactions of the others, so, probably a lot of us don't bother in completely hide our discomfort when in presence of their crisis, probably hurting them still more. This book can teach all of us to be more sensible and solidary to mental ill people, but it is a distressful reading, because we suffer together with the author, chapter after chapter. I did a bad choice to decide reading all book in the bus, because in the last chapter I had to use a lot of self control to avoid to cry.
One reviewer seem a little uncomfortable because the author repeatedly cites her intellectual merits, but I think that is absolutely necessary, because the healthy people usually think of mentally ill people like mentally lame, and probably it is not easy to break this misconception, so, her emphasis is welcome and is not a sign of poor writing, but of good writing abilities. She knows what is important to reiterate to her message can be understood. You don't break prejudices only explaining fact after fact, prejudices are hypnotic standards of thought, so you need treat them according and hit the same key again and again and again...
Well, I am not that kind of reviewer that put a summary of each chapter, if you want this, try the "Look inside" feature. I think that is much more useful to tell what a person think and feels about the book, because these human reactions are what we share in commom and says more about the books than a summary.
Now, I want to say some few things about this sickness, and if you are a materialistic person or a Christian person ( the type of person that think that the bible has all answers), stop to read here, to avoid waste your time.
Elyn Saks describes some situations about her "delusions" that seems clearly psychic attacks and this hypothesis should be checked too, together with the schizophrenia hypothesis. In our materialistic society any time when a person see, hears or feels anything that is not physically present, this is interpreted like madness. It is so with astral projection, with see/hear spirits, auras, elementals, or pre/retrocognition. The materialistic point of view is very ignorant about this matters, so, its conclusions has completely no value in this subject. The fact the medicines were able to control or stop the delusions only shows the the medicines can block the perceptions of the person. Off course, a good part of the psychic attack is nothing more than spiritual bullying, so, if you can prevent the victim of perceive the bullying, you can block the negatives effects of the psychic attack, WHILE YOU TAKE YOUR MEDICINES. However, like the most in the medicine, you are only treating the symptoms, not the cause, that MAY be spiritual.
A lot of things that Elyn Saks saw or thought during her crisis ( and a lot of mental diseases, but not all of them) , mainly her thoughts about she worth nothing, are the usual technique in psychic attacks, and if she had knew some reliable psychic ( the reliable never will charge any money for this) maybe she can find another answers to her situation, and another solutions.
I know that this maybe sounds a little strange in the American culture, but if you can tolerates learn about spiritualism, you can discover that there are more facts than beliefs about this situations. However, IF situations the Elyn tells us about were, in fact, psychic attack, not schizophrenia, even so they are very hard to solve, because there are strong reasons to this kind of problem, usually a person never faces hard problems without strong reasons to them, and in this kind of situation, I mean, psychic attack, usually the offenders were, usually, victims in past incarnations, and the actual victim is, usually (but not always), the tormentor. Silt the actual victim with medicines can help her, but will not solve the problem, IF THE PROBLEMS WERE NOT MENTAL. Anyway, only a psychic can say if there were any real entities attacking the victim or if all was only delusion, a materialistic doctor is not able to conclude nothing about this. In a ideal world, the psychiatrist should be a psychic too.
To those people that has any curiosity about the several problems and nuances of psychic attacks and methods of solutions that SOME GROUPS of spiritualists uses, this book has a lot of study cases:
Spirit and Matter: New Horizons for Medicine
I think that people suffering with mental disorders lose a lot to confine themselves to materialistic point of view, but anyone has the right to only accept the solutions that are according with their beliefs, even if this only treat the symptoms, not the cause.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 22, 2013"I needed to put two critical ideas together: that I could both be mentally ill and lead a rich and satisfying life." ~ (Locations 5056-58)
Elyn R. Saks is a professor who has struggled with schizophrenia for most of her life. As a child she became slightly obsessive compulsive and then anorexic. As she grew older she started to have more symptoms of the disease and suffered for many years without medication.
Throughout the book you will read completely honest revelations of what it is like to be on medication and to be off medication. You will be amazed at how creative a writer Elyn R. Saks is and how she remembers precises details of her life, even down to conversations she had with numerous people. Obviously she has a brilliant mind to remember with such clarity.
At times this book can be shockingly honest but it is never frightening as I thought it might be. Elyn R. Saks always seems to have protections in place so when she falls gravely ill she has a support system and friends to help her.
For some of the book you may feel frustrated that Elyn R. Saks thinks she can function without medication. Each time she is thrown back into a debilitating psychosis. The triggers are interesting and for that reason I think this book can explain a mentally ill person's basic needs for understanding and support.
As we watch Elyn R. Saks struggle with her demons we are invited into a very private world of fears most will never experience. People who are mentally ill will however really relate to the hallucinations and voices and feeling of impending doom.
Overall this book is a captivating and compelling story of one woman's journey to happiness and success. As I finished this book I was so glad I had read it. The ending is profound and when Elyn R. Saks comes to terms with her illness you will feel a great sense of relief.
~The Rebecca Review
- Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2024I really enjoyed reading this memoir. It gave a real and candid glimpse into the condition of Schizophrenia and detailed how the author overcame the obstacles of this condition and offered hope to those suffering with the condition as well. I appreciate how the author did not hold back, and painted how intense and frightening psychosis can be, and how even more frightening and frustrating it can be to seek help for this serious condition. My only negative criticism I have is the book did become repetitive at times, especially towards the end when the author kept detailing how she kept going off medication, had a rebound in psychosis, and would then go back on medication. There were also some loose ends in the book that I really wished the author tied up, like what happened with the Tardive Dyskinesia? Lastly, I found that the overall flow of the writing was limited at times. However, despite it’s shortcomings, I found this memoir to be wonderful and would definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in knowing more about Schizophrenia.
Top reviews from other countries
Cliente KindleReviewed in Brazil on October 4, 20245.0 out of 5 stars Greatfull
Please translate for more langages. Im Brazilian! I hope my loved one can read it some day.
Mais estudantes de psicologia, profissionais da saude, pessoas com essa doença mental e familiares poderia ter acesso.
We can mourn and than acept our limits while reading.
I were looking for some good reference. There it is! Hehe im very thankfull.
John L.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 1, 20255.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating story, told candidly, with warmth and humour.
I am close to someone with schizophrenia, and this book has helped me to see it more clearly from the inside, as well as the outside. This personal story gives understanding, as well as the knowledge that is to be found in technical books. I think people like me who are close to someone would find the book very valuable. People with schizophrenia might also find that it's enlightening and encouraging, while being starkly realistic. For people who have never come across schizophrenia, it will be an eye-opener.
AlexandraReviewed in Italy on May 18, 20245.0 out of 5 stars Una studentessa in triennale di scienze e tecniche psicologiche
I chose this book as an example for my tesi (not sure of what the translation might be), but i could not even imagine how important it might have become for me. It was an incredibile journey, i cried and i was filled with joy for every beautiful and well deserved happiness she encountered. I will love to write about her book, i will encourage my friends and collegues to read it, and i m sure i will think about it a lot in my life. I am gratefull for the decision to write down the details about her journey because i think is the most effective way to, at least, start to understand how hard it might be living with such condition and how much stigma there is to overcome. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
AturoReviewed in Germany on March 29, 20245.0 out of 5 stars Amazing book
By far the best book. I‘ve ever read. A very touching and relatable story about living with an mental illness. A must read for any schizophrenic out there.
SuzanneReviewed in Australia on January 24, 20235.0 out of 5 stars Awesome read
One of the best books i have read on the subjet. Elyn is an exceptional writer and storyteller. I highly reccomemd this book to anyone wanting to better understand mental illness.






