The center cannot hold by Elyn Saks - Book Report/Review Example

Book Review ‘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 (Saks 352). The book shades light on Saks’s struggle with hallucinations, delusions, and imagined voices as she struggled with mental illness but triumphing ultimately. The book provides insight into her battle through madness, an understanding of the illness which she fights and tries to accept as part of herself. 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 (Saks 13). 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 (Saks 65). 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 manage her illness when hospitalized at Yale psychiatric institute. She shows that she could take care of her own situation. She shows an understanding of the complicated nature of her illness and her own ability to manage it. She states that she had to learn to stop voicing her hallucinations and delusions. She started to see herself as a law student not a mental patient. She gives credit to another psychoanalyst, Dr. Freed, who helped her understand that her psychotic thoughts and experience were unconsciously motivated and meaningful. Towards the novel’s end, Saks credits both psychoanalysts and psychopharmacology for the improvement she has made in her life (Saks 298). She says that medication kept her alive and through psychoanalysts, she got to find purpose and find her life worth living. ‘The center cannot hold’ provides an interesting read. Saks story is nothing short of phenomenal. To suffer extensively as she did from schizophrenia and still come out triumphing is an inspiration to the reader. The book provides an extraordinary perspective for the reader as Saks details her struggle with Schizophrenia from an expert and sufferer point of view. Schizophrenia develops slowly before getting compulsive. As she strives to attain stability, she undergoes medication and psychoanalysis (Saks 298). Her personal experience of the illness allows her to advocate the plight of mental patients in areas related to work, medication, and hospitalization. Through her book, the readers can draw a sense of battle, struggle, fight, and hope when they get their backs against the walls. Saks’s book shows her fight against the stigma that gets attached to schizophrenia (Saks 208). She gets to understand early that receiving job offers is difficult unless she hides the fact of her condition. She gets to explain how schizophrenics are not psychotic all the time and do not pose harm to others. They in fact pose greatest harm to themselves. Through her book, she gets to show that it is possible for people who get diagnosed with schizophrenia to have a life. They can get to find work and love in their lives however difficult their situation might appear. Saks uses her illness to power her dreams in the field of academia as it even influences her choices in her academic field. Saks’s book provides a vivid description of her psychotic conditions that come across as depressing. But through her candid description of her condition, this book provides hope to the readers. The author is honest enough to share her battle with schizophrenia with the readers. Even with the obstacles that she faces, Saks manages to hold herself together. She struggles by herself to find treatment and a means to control her situation. Her story evokes determination which brings hope to the reader. The book details that there is hope for the future and that the reader just like Saks should understand the importance of having hope. Battles come and go, but through determination, perseverance and hope, each and every one can emerge victorious. Saks offers a lighting and optimistic path for mental health patients. Her book provides a vital contribution to the field of psychology with the Saks’s personal reflection. ‘The center cannot hold’ by Ellyn Saks bears similar resemblance to ‘An unquiet mind’ by Kay Redfield Jamison. Both books detail the struggles of mental health patient who through determination managed to control their conditions and still excel at their pursuits. Jamison explores the issues of bipolar illness that held her ransom at various stages through her life from the same perspective that gets offered by Saks in her book (Jamison 12). They both provide a dual perspective of their situations from an expert and sufferer point of view. Both books show the struggle that mental health patients get faced with in terms of medication and seeking treatment. Both authors are brutally honest in providing the readers with a picture of how their lives are and were with their conditions. Both authors are women who are fearless enough to admit about their mental health conditions and they write so extensively about their conditions. Both authors serve as an inspiration to their readers as they have excelled academically in their fields of psychiatry. Both these books are highly motivational and it is difficult to pick one over the other. They have a similar style of narrative from the authors. They both detail on mental health conditions and how the authors lived with and against the conditions. Both books may get filled with depressing accounts of the authors as they battled with their demons but in actual sense provide hope to the reader. Both books form an integral part in transforming and saving lives of the readers with their vivid and wise descriptions that make them very loveable memoirs. Works Cited Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. New York : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009. Saks, Elyn R. The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness. New York: Hyperion, 2008. Read More