Title: The Centre Cannot Hold - A
memoir of my schizophrenia
Author: Elyn R. Saks
Published: 2007
Genre: Memoir
I enjoyed this book tremendously
and was also completely horrified by some aspects of it. Why horrified? The
thought that one can go through the experiences that she went through; the
misdiagnosis of her illness, the forced admission into mental hospitals and
subsequent forced drug treatment - and all due to the fragile definition of
what is defined as mentally stable. Mild depression or complete
psychosis can, if there is no one there to speak up for you, earn you the type
of treatment reserved solely for mentally 'unstable' people. Every time I
gather with family and friends around a dinner table, I always insist that we
all have a gratitude moment...the one constant for me is always 'I am grateful
for my sanity'. I always either manage to elicit chuckles or curiously-raised
eyebrows. And such is the reaction that mental health issues elicit wherever
you are in the world. Elyn Saks takes the reader through a process of
explaining what 'losing one's mind' truly means.
