The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

by Elyn R. Saks

Many people who suffer from manic depression and depression lead full and rich lives: Journalists Mike Wallace and Jane Pauley, the writer William Styron, and the psychologist and writer Kay Redfield Jamison are just a few prominent examples. Famous historical figures may have suffered from mood disorders as well—Abraham Lincoln, Vincent Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Johnson. Go to any support group of people with mood disorders and, with some understandable sense of pride, they will name their famous forebears and their contemporary heroes. However, people with thought disorders do not keep a list of famous and successful people who share their problem. They can’t, because there is no such list. Comparatively few schizophrenics lead happy and productive lives; those who do aren’t in any hurry to tell the world about themselves. That said, some people with a thought disorder accomplish great things before they become incapacitated by illness. John Nash, for example, received the Nobel Prize for discoveries he made early in his career. He then spent much of his ensuing adult life delusional, wandering the Princeton campus, drifting aimlessly in and out of the university library. In time, Nash (and his family and his doctors) built a support system sufficient for him to largely manage his disease and even “recover” from it, which was movingly captured in A Beautiful Mind.