The Center Cannot Hold

This is the Horatio Alger story for talented young women who develop schizophrenia. Elyn Saks, a law professor at USC, tells a story of descent into a kind of madness that has a truly happy ending. Not the kind of happy ending literary novels offer us, in which contentment is laced with sadness. Elyn conquers her demons like a superhero.

I first read this book in graduate school, and it completely changed the way I think about schizophrenia and the daily experience of living with a mental illness.

This memoir chronicles Saks’ experiences attending Oxford University and then Yale Law School with ever more progressive symptoms of schizophrenia; she details her therapy sessions as she worked closely with a psychoanalyst and then the journey to study psychoanalysis herself. I was captivated by Saks’ experience and her skilled storytelling.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that most commonly emerges in the Quarterlife years and frequently after people have gone away to college.… show more.

Books on mental illness usually describe it either from the outside or the inside. Elyn Saks does both, integrating a subjective, first-person view with an objective, scholarly perspective. Saks is a legal scholar and psychoanalyst who has struggled with schizophrenia since her childhood. She combines vivid descriptions of what it feels like to be psychotic with clear-eyed discussions of the scientific, medical, and legal issues raised by schizophrenia. I haven’t read a better book on mental illness.

Saks offers up her life as a schizophrenic with gripping immediacy and candor. It is vanishingly rare to gain insight into the minds of schizophrenics, who often puzzle and alarm those who walk past them in locked wards or on the street. Elyn Saks was still a girl in suburban Miami in the early 1960s when her sense of self began, periodically, to waver and dissolve. She writes, “The “me” becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal.” It would be years before she understood what was happening to… show more.