The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

by Elyn R. Saks

She was not afraid; she did not look at me with alarm in her eyes. She did not judge, she only listened, and reflected back to me what she heard, telling me what she thought it meant.

Different bodies respond differently to different medication; finding the magic potion is pretty much hit-and-miss. This seems obvious, even simplistic, but it’s the only consistently true fact in treating mental illness.

You are only a machine, with insides made of metal. Medication and talk therapy allay this terrible feeling, but friendship can be as powerful as either.

(as with Mrs. Jones, but unlike all the medical doctors to date), White did not recoil from me. He never put me in the hospital (under the guise of protecting me while actually protecting himself ), but stood his ground when I was most frightening, and vowed to protect me. He knew better than anyone that most of the time, I was literally scared out of my wits.

Everybody, on some level, needs a good day-care program: Mine was the Yale Law School.

Place yourself in the middle of the room. Turn on the stereo, the television, and a beeping video game, and then invite into the room several small children with ice cream cones. Crank up the volume on each piece of electrical equipment, then take away the children’s ice cream. Imagine these circumstances existing every day and night of your life. What would you do?

Stigma against mental illness is a scourge with many faces, and the medical community wears a number of those faces. A psychiatric patient at a program where Steve once worked went for weeks with a broken back; none of the medical people the patient saw took the man’s pain seriously—he was a mental patient.

as far as we’ve progressed in research and treatment, recent statistics indicate that only one in five people with schizophrenia can ever be expected to live independently and hold a job.

I think Steve’s right when he talks about psychosis as being like a trauma. Psychosis does traumatize you, in much the same way that ducking gunfire in a war zone or having a terrible car crash traumatizes you. And the best way to take away the power of trauma is to talk about what happened.

Whenever I was out someplace and heard people laughing together, I’d turn toward the sound in much the same way a flower turns to the sun. To laugh, to tease; not to be afraid of saying or doing something stupid or clumsy, because even if you did, you’d be loved anyway, and you’d always know it.

Law is based on a theory of personhood; that is, the concept of someone who can make choices and suffer consequences, and who understands the threat of sanction. The doctrine of informed consent (indeed, most of American political theory) presumes that we are not just subjects to be directed, but rather autonomous beings capable of making independent decisions.

There’s no way to overstate what a thunderclap this revelation was to me. And with it, my final and most profound resistance to the idea I was mentally ill began to give way. Ironically, the more I accepted I had a mental illness, the less the illness defined me—at which point the riptide set me free.

Medication has no doubt played a central role in helping me manage my psychosis, but what has allowed me to see the meaning in my struggles—to make sense of everything that happened before and during the course of my illness, and to mobilize what strengths I may possess into a rich and productive life—is talk therapy.

For years, I’d seen my body as the place that I lived, and the real me was in my mind; the body was just the carrying case, and not a very dependable one—kind of dirty, animal-like, unreliable.

With proper treatment, someone who is mentally ill can lead a full and rich life. What makes life wonderful—good friends, a satisfying job, loving relationships—is just as valuable for those of us who struggle with schizophrenia as for anyone else.