The Center Cannot Hold Elyn Saks
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The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Elyn R. Hyperion $24.95 (340p) ISBN 978-1-4013-0138-5. I n this engrossing memoir, Saks, a professor of psychiatry. Publisher's Summary Professor of psychiatry Elyn R. Saks writes about her struggle with schizophrenia in this unflinching account of her mental illness. In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks draws readers into a nightmare world of medications, a misguided health-care system, and social stigmas. But she would not be.
‘The center cannot hold’ is a book by Elyn Saks. In her book, Saks discusses candidly and frankly about her struggle with Schizophrenia. Saks is a distinguished lawyer, professor, and psychiatrist but has suffered from schizophrenia for a large chunk of her life and still continues to have bouts of the illness. 'THE Center Cannot HOLD – Elyn R. Saks' Essay for a book called 'The Center Cannot HOLD – Elyn R. Weber State University. Abnormal Psychology (PSY 3010) Uploaded. Vanessa Dzmurova.
The Centre Cannot Hold Elyn Saks
The book chronicles Saks’s life from the first time she heard voices as a teenager, to attempting suicide in college, and eventually learning to live on her own as an adult while overcoming obstacles that popped up around her world.Saks first symptoms appeared as obsessions and night terrors when she was only eight and living in Miami. The disease started off subtly for Saks. She describes her initial fears as though she was dissolving like a sand castle with all the sand sliding away. She then began to fear unnamed strangers. She stopped eating at puberty in a bid to gain control of her life. She experimented with drugs at her adolescent age and this forced her parents to enroll in a drug treatment program. A restrictive high school anti-drug program saw her symptoms grow worse. By the time she joined Vanderbilt University, she became an awkward outsider. It is at Vanderbilt University while pursuing her undergrad, that it became further apparent that she might have a difficult psychological life. Her anxiety became constant and she only found solace through her academic work. She only got to draw most of her identity through academic work. 
Her condition became full blown when she joined graduate school at Oxford University as a Marshall scholar. At Oxford, she began to burn herself with cigarettes, electric heaters, boiling water, and lighters (Saks 78). Her condition deteriorated massively as the voices inside her head grew much louder. She had full blown psychotic episodes and increased suicidal fantasies that she got hospitalized. She got forced into a psychiatric hospital at this stage. Saks reveals of how horrifying and demeaning when she got forced to the ward. She saw it as her freedom getting taken away. She got isolated from friends and family, she could not move around freely, and her freedom of choice got limited. Her interest in academia, powerful intellect, and strong will helped hold her life together even against the growing inner voices and visions. Saks credits her visits to a sympathetic psychoanalyst, Miss Jones, as helpful towards her ability to keep going and even later manage to graduate (Saks 154). Saks later attended Yale law school where during her first term, she undergoes a breakdown. She is left singing at midnight on the top of the roof of the law school library. She gets taken to the emergency room where she becomes force-fed antipsychotic medication. She also gets tied hand and foot to the cold metal of the hospital bed. She ends up spending five months in the psychiatric ward. This marked the beginning of Saks’s long battle with her inner voices and the stigma she received at the time. In her book, she reveals that hospital restraints made her feel hopeless and helpless against flying medications. So too did the forced medications do little to control her fears and delusions. After graduation from Yale, she held a string of short term jobs before getting hired to lecture at the University Of Southern California Gould School Of Law (Saks 198). Here she gets promoted and even gets to marry her longtime boyfriend. Saks describes her life with living with and against her illness. She gets analytical and insightful as she tries to get an understanding of how she got to develop her illness. How did she end up having terrible thoughts and feelings? She speaks of how she got to learn to Elyn Saks Schizophrenia
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