The Centre Cannot Hold: A Memoir of My Schizophrenia

(Paperback)

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Highly articulate and self-aware, Elyn Saks offers a moving insight into the world of a schizophrenic. This compelling account will bring hope to sufferers and understanding to all.

Elyn Saks is Professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School. She's the author of several books. Happily married. And - a schizophrenic. Saks lifts the veil on schizophrenia with her startling and honest account of how she learned to live with this debilitating disease. With a coolly clear, measured tone she talks about her condition, the stigma attached and the deadening effects of medication. Her controlled narrative is disrupted by interjections from the part of her mind she has learned to suppress. Delusions, hallucinations and threatening voices cut into her reality and Saks, in a remarkably vivid way, enables us to hear and see them too. This is a powerful book that is as informative as it is moving. There are parallels with Jane Lapotaire's TIME OUT OF MIND and with GIRL, INTERRUPTED.

Reviews

'Schizophrenia is an ominous word- and we too often equate it with a life of misery, isolation and psychotic torment. I know of no better corrective to this than TCCH, a detailed memoir of how, with medication, sensitive support (and, in Prof. Saks' case, psychoanalysis), a deeply schizophrenic person can achieve a life full of creative work and love... It is the most lucid and hopeful memoir of living with schizophrenia I have ever read' Oliver Sacks

Author Bio

Elyn Saks is a professor at the University of Southern California Law School and the University of California, and Research Clinical Associate at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She studied at Oxford and at Yale Law School and has published three books.

Author Location: California, USA