Book Review: Washington Post

WHAT THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: My Journey Through Madness

31 August 2007

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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Categories: Book

Book Review: Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Awakenings and Musicophilia

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness

30 August 2007

Schizophrenia is an ominous word — and we too often equate it with a life of misery, isolation, and psychotic torment. I know of no better corrective to this than The Center Cannot Hold, a detailed memoir of how, with medication, sensitive support (and, in Professor Saks's case, psychoanalysis), a deeply schizophrenic person can achieve a life full of creative work and love and friendships. It is the most lucid and hopeful memoir of living with schizophrenia I have ever read.

Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Awakenings and Musicophilia

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Categories: Book

Book Review: Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness

In this engrossing memoir, Saks, a professor of psychiatry at U.C. San Diego, demonstrates a novelist's skill of creating character, dialogue and suspense. From her extraordinary perspective as both expert and sufferer (diagnosis: 'Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation'; prognosis: 'Grave'), Saks carries the reader from the early 'little quirks' to the full blown 'falling apart, flying apart, exploding' psychosis. 'Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog,' as Saks shows, 'becoming imperceptibly thicker as time goes on.' Along the way to stability (treatment, not cure), Saks is treated with a pharmacopeia of drugs and by a chorus of therapists. In her jargon-free style, she describes the workings of the drugs ('getting med-free,' a constant motif) and the ideas of the therapists and physicians (psychologist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, cardiologist, endocrinologist). Her personal experience of a world in which she is both frightened and frightening is graphically drawn and leads directly to her advocacy of mental patients' civil rights as they confront compulsory medication, civil commitment, the abuse of restraints and 'the absurdities of the mental care system.' She is a strong proponent of talk therapy ('While medication had kept me alive, it had been psychoanalysis that helped me find a life worth living'). This is heavy reading, but Saks's account will certainly stand out in its field." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

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Categories: Book