Reviewed by Susan Adams What is it like to battle a severe mental illness? In "The Center Cannot Hold," Elyn R. Saks describes the terror and turmoil of psychosis as she wrestles with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. When she is ill, Saks rocks back and forth, raves about murdering babies and fights off her demons with heavy doses of Navane. Then, in periods of recovery, she enjoys a top-flight career as a professor of psychiatry. Her lucidity and intelligence allow her to describe her ordeal with precision and sensitivity. Saks insists that talk therapy helps her ward off psychosis, "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." After a couple hundred pages, the accounts of her repeated psychotic breaks and recoveries start to wear on the reader. Her narrative could be tighter. And yet she also writes with affecting emotion, especially in the passages that describe the healing power of friendship and love. Susan Adams is an editor at Forbes magazine.

Washington Post Writers Group

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