The Center Cannot Hold

The cover of Ellen Saks' memoir tells us that the book is a "lucid and hopeful memoir of living with schizophrenia." Her subtitle calls it a "journey through madness."

Lucid, indeed.  Saks' mind is both "brilliant" and "broken." Even during (and in spite of) her periods of "florid psychoses," she earns advanced degrees at Oxford and Yale, becomes a professor, then goes on to study psychoanalysis.

Before she finally admits that she will need meds for the rest of her life, she has all the symptoms of full-blown schizophrenia--starting as a teenager when houses talked to her.  She was an outcast and very lonely in her school days, and she stopped eating--yet was advised by her parents (who were well-meaning and cared for her) to just "try harder."

When she leaves home for college, her symptoms flare in horrific ways. She babbles nonsense, she has excruciating hallucinations, and she doesn't shower or brush her teeth.  She hides under desks and mutters.  She finds it hard to make friends or care about her physical appearance because the voices in her head take all her energy. She is hospitalized  and put into restraints a few times.

In her years of college and graduate studies, she finds it very hard to make friends.  When others laugh, she's sure they are laughing at her.  She believes she is evil and has the capacity to kill people. She wonders how anyone could possibly be her friend if she told them the truth about her condition.

And yet, in time, she does make a few trusted friends and finds a series of therapists--whom she sees up to six days a week. Without these people, it's unlikely that she would have survived.

I had to put the book down and take several breaks because it's painful to read.  Patients with mental illness of this magnitude don't get to take breaks. I've read books by people who were strongly affected by a parents' mental illness, but this is the first time I've read a first-person account  by someone suffering from the disease.

It's been intriguing (and sad, and shocking, and illuminating) to be a voyeur on her journey, one that took her decades to live and took me only two days to read.  This vicarious journey reminded me that the catastrophes that befall other people could (with just a few biochemical differences in the brain) belong to me or anyone I know.

With her brilliant and broken brain, Elyn Saks achieves more than most people with normal brains do--driven by her lifelong mantra to "try harder."  She winds up with a good marriage, a prestigious career, and the ability to live with and manage her disease.

Except for a few episodes of depression, I've never experienced an impaired brain.  But even when minor garden-variety depression rolls in for a day or two like a heavy cloud, I have a minuscule taste of something being cracked.

Obsessing over small errors of judgment--mine or other people's; lacking the energy to do the things that are usually effortless; fading of the vivid colors of "happy things" from just a day before; feeling lonely yet wanting to be alone--these are just a few of the signs that my brain is on low-power and needs a reboot.

It takes a little courage to even admit to ordinary depression (I, who like to be Susie Sunshine); it must have taken Elyn Saks unimaginable bravery to tell her harrowing story with such candor.