Book Review: The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

On their own, the words “mental” and “illness” usually strike some degree of fear in the average person. Together, they can get the ball rolling for panic to set in.

Throw “schizophrenia” into the mix?

Well, you may just have yourself the makings of full blown terror.

The National Institute of Mental Illness defines schizophrenia as “a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder.”

Chronic? Severe? Disabling?!

However, being diagnosed with schizophrenia is not a cue for fear, panic, or terror to set in (well, at least not set in and get too comfortable), and Elyn R. Saks proves this point as she chronicles her life, and battles, with schizophrenia in her memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness.

In The Center Cannot Hold, Saks takes us on a journey through her childhood, teen, and adult years – a journey that, just like she describes, rolls in like a “slow fog,” pauses to reflect on the first signs of schizophrenia, breaks to battle with symptoms that threatened to not only cripple, but completely stop her academic pursuits, and forges on as Saks finally comes to terms with her illness and learns to live her life in a way that fosters good mental health without sacrificing her life’s successes.

Successes that include no less than graduating from Vanderbilt, Oxford, and Yale; working as an attorney; teaching at the University of Bridgeport School of Law; and now employed as Associate Dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego.

Whoa.

From the moment I started reading until the book came to an end, I was absolutely captivated with Saks’s story. With an almost raw honesty, she talks about her struggles with various therapists and psychiatrists, her failed attempts at managing schizophrenia without medication, her experiences in mental hospitals, her fear of how finding out about her illness might affect her relationships and how people treated her, and how, in the end, it all led her to become a passionate advocate for mental health patients’ rights.

Aside from the fact that you’ll be too captivated to put it down, The Center Cannot Hold is an easy read in that Saks is quite effective in telling her story without confusing medical jargon; however, it’s a heavy read in that her story will stick with you long after the printed words are over.

Flowery language and metaphors aside, this book is a must read for anyone interested in learning more about mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, and anyone who currently feels people with mental illness are doomed to a foggy and heavily medicated miserable life full of failure and disappointment.

To learn more about Elyn R. Saks, visit her USC Gould School of Law faculty page, listen to her discuss the book, or purchase The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness and read it yourself. Its publisher, Hyperion, has now made it available in paperback for $14.95. Of course, if you need more convincing, Google provides a few snippets to whet your appetite.

In the meantime, you can learn more about schizophrenia right here at Mental Health Notes when you visit Tell Me More About Schizophrenia: Signs, Symptoms, And Treatments and NAMI Presents Schizophrenia: Public Attitudes, Personal Needs.

Image is being used with permission from Hyperion.