[bksvol-discuss] Second submission
- From: "solsticesinger" <solsticesinger25@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 11 May 2008 19:27:09 -0500
I have also submitted The Center Can Not Hold: My Journey Through Madness by
Elyn R. Saks. Headers and common scannos have been removed. Page breaks are
protected. Find the synopsis below.
Elyn Saks is a success by any measure: she's an endowed professor at the
prestigious University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has
managed
to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a
"grave" prognosis -- and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her
life.
Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny
1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and
night
terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall
Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head
and
terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.
Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first
term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law
school
library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed
antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a
hospital bed.
She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.
So began Saks's long war with her own internal demons and the equally
powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who
researches
and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a
wonderful man.
In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the
paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the
voices in
her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she
overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a
classic
in the genre.
I am only one; but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can
do something. And because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do
the
something I can do.
- Everett Edward Hale, 1822 - 1909
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