The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness Paperback
Author: Visit Amazon's Elyn R. Saks Page - ISBN: 1401309445 - Language: English - Format: PDF, EPUB
DESCRIPTION
From Publishers Weekly
In this engrossing memoir, Saks, a professor of law and psychiatry at the University of Southern California, demonstrates a novelist's skill of creating character, dialogue and suspense. From her extraordinary perspective as both expert and sufferer (diagnosis: Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation; prognosis: Grave), Saks carries the reader from the early little quirks to the full blown falling apart, flying apart, exploding psychosis. Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, as Saks shows, becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on.- Along the way to stability (treatment, not cure), Saks is treated with a pharmacopeia of drugs and by a chorus of therapists. In her jargon-free style, she describes the workings of the drugs (getting med-free, a constant motif) and the ideas of the therapists and physicians (psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, cardiologist, endocrinologist). Her personal experience of a world in which she is both frightened and frightening is graphically drawn and leads directly to her advocacy of mental patients' civil rights as they confront compulsory medication, civil commitment, the abuse of restraints and the absurdities of the mental care system. She is a strong proponent of talk therapy (While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that helped me find a life worth living). This is heavy reading, but Saks's account will certainly stand out in its field.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Booklist
At eight years old, Saks began suffering hallucinations and obsessive fears of being attacked. An adolescent experimentation with drugs provoked her parents to enroll her in a drug treatment program. But Saks' incredible self-control masked the fact that she was suffering from a debilitating mental illness. By the time she entered graduate school at Oxford University, her symptoms were so severe—including full-blown psychotic episodes and suicidal fantasies—that she was hospitalized. Through Oxford, law school at Yale, and a move to Los Angeles to work in the law school of the University of California, Saks struggled mightily to balance her ambitions with her illness, which was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenia. Never wanting to concede to her mental illness, Saks founds calm and comfort in a rigorous work routine. An analyst characterized her as having three lives: as Elyn, as Professor Saks, and as the Lady of the Charts mental patient. As Saks battled to get off medication and leave behind the Lady of the Charts, she fought for the rights of mental patients, and came to terms with her own limitations. Bush, Vanessa
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
See all Editorial Reviews
DETAILS
- Paperback: 368 pages
- Publisher: Hyperion; Reprint edition (August 12, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1401309445
- ISBN-13: 978-1401309442
- Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #22,845 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #4 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Schizophrenia
- #13 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists
- #22 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > West
REVIEWS
The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Elyn R Saks on Amazon com FREE shipping on qualifying offers Elyn R Saks is an esteemed professor lawyer The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness By Elyn R In The Center Cannot Hold Saks remarkable new book is a voice from a country rarely NOOK Book eBook Paperback The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Viewing The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Ebook The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Size 5 75 MB D t dd d 19 08 2012 thor Elyn R Saks Book format pdf audio epub text ipad Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness at Amazon com Read honest and unbiased product reviews from Click here for Availability Click here to read more customer reviews Book Read PDF of the center cannot hold my journey through madness book download Author Elyn Saks Author Title The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Paperback Category Books ISBN 9781401309442 Price 16 00 Release date Sak s third book is Refusing Care to 39 The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Book information and reviews for ISBN 1401309445 The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness by Elyn R Saks The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness published by Hyperion The Center Cannot Hold My Journey Through Madness Create a book Download as PDF
In "The Second Coming," Yeats writes: "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." From this evocative poem comes the title of this searing "journey through madness," by the brilliant and courageous Elyn Saks. The author had an idyllic childhood in a loving and prosperous Miami home. However, when she was eight, she began to experience intense compulsions, night terrors, and most frightening of all, a feeling that her mind "was like a sand castle with all the sand sliding away." "Sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings [didn't] go together." When she was twelve, she stopped eating properly and lost an alarming amount of weight. Elyn feared that something was terribly wrong with her, and she did her utmost to hide her condition from her friends and family.
When she was a teenager, Saks experimented briefly with drugs, and this brought on more unpleasant symptoms. Things deteriorated further when she entered Vanderbilt University, where "schizophrenia [rolled] in like a slow fog," and she began to neglect her personal hygiene, forgetting to bathe and change her clothes. As a college freshman, she miraculously earned top grades while she struggled to keep her hallucinations at bay. Her "illness was beginning to poke through the shell" that helped her separate fantasy from reality. As long as the shell was intact, she could fool the world. When the shell broke down, so did she.
In "The Center Cannot Hold," Saks describes a see-saw existence in which she excelled at her studies while trying to keep her mental illness from disabling her.
PREVIEW
The Center Cannot Hold DOWNLOAD
No comments:
Post a Comment