{PRETITLE} The Center Cannot Hold {POSTTITLE}

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Author: Elyn R. Saks
ISBN : B000WHVRZS
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Download PRETITLE The Center Cannot Hold [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE from 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror linkElyn Saks is a success by any measure: she's an endowed professor at the prestigious University of Southern California Gould School of Law. She has managed to achieve this in spite of being diagnosed as schizophrenic and given a "grave" prognosis--and suffering the effects of her illness throughout her life.

Saks was only eight, and living an otherwise idyllic childhood in sunny 1960s Miami, when her first symptoms appeared in the form of obsessions and night terrors. But it was not until she reached Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar that her first full-blown episode, complete with voices in her head and terrifying suicidal fantasies, forced her into a psychiatric hospital.

Saks would later attend Yale Law School where one night, during her first term, she had a breakdown that left her singing on the roof of the law school library at midnight. She was taken to the emergency room, force-fed antipsychotic medication, and tied hand-and-foot to the cold metal of a hospital bed. She spent the next five months in a psychiatric ward.

So began Saks's long war with her own internal demons and the equally powerful forces of stigma. Today she is a chaired professor of law who researches and writes about the rights of the mentally ill. She is married to a wonderful man.

In The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn Saks discusses frankly and movingly the paranoia, the inability to tell imaginary fears from real ones, and the voices in her head insisting she do terrible things, as well as the many obstacles she overcame to become the woman she is today. It is destined to become a classic in the genre.Direct download links available for PRETITLE The Center Cannot Hold [Kindle Edition] POSTTITLE

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• File Size: 304 KB
• Print Length: 364 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 140130138X
• Publisher: Hyperion; Reprint edition (August 14, 2007)
• Sold by: Hachette Book Group
  
• Language: English
• ASIN: B000WHVRZS
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #29,223 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #4
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists
  • #7
    in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Schizophrenia
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    in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists
• #4
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists
• #7
  in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Mental Health > Schizophrenia
• #14
  in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Social Scientists & Psychologists

{PRETITLE} The Center Cannot Hold {POSTTITLE}

In "The Second Coming," Yeats writes: "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." From this evocative poem comes the title of this searing "journey through madness," by the brilliant and courageous Elyn Saks. The author had an idyllic childhood in a loving and prosperous Miami home. However, when she was eight, she began to experience intense compulsions, night terrors, and most frightening of all, a feeling that her mind "was like a sand castle with all the sand sliding away." "Sights, sounds, thoughts, and feelings [didn't] go together." When she was twelve, she stopped eating properly and lost an alarming amount of weight. Elyn feared that something was terribly wrong with her, and she did her utmost to hide her condition from her friends and family.

When she was a teenager, Saks experimented briefly with drugs, and this brought on more unpleasant symptoms. Things deteriorated further when she entered Vanderbilt University, where "schizophrenia [rolled] in like a slow fog," and she began to neglect her personal hygiene, forgetting to bathe and change her clothes. As a college freshman, she miraculously earned top grades while she struggled to keep her hallucinations at bay. Her "illness was beginning to poke through the shell" that helped her separate fantasy from reality. As long as the shell was intact, she could fool the world. When the shell broke down, so did she.

In "The Center Cannot Hold," Saks describes a see-saw existence in which she excelled at her studies while trying to keep her mental illness from disabling her.

What's the "that" referenced above? The answer is provided in the previous sentences, "Over and over, I replayed the previous five years, trying frantically every single moment to keep the demons in my head from invading the plane and savaging the other passengers. From time to time, I considered asking the flight attendant whether she would mind if I jumped out the emergency door".

This is a book about living with schizophrenia, and it is a great book, remarkable in many respects.

Elyn Saks, endowed professor at USC's Gould School of Law, has written a gripping memoir of a life spent grappling with and eventually coming to terms with this disease.

Here's her description of what she was up against, "Schizophrenia rolls in like a slow fog, becoming imperceptively thicker as time goes on. At first, the day is bright enough, the sky is clear, the sunlight warms your shoulders. But soon, you notice a haze beginning to gather around you, and the air feels not quite so warm. After a while, the sun is a dim light bulb behind a heavy cloth. The horizon has vanished into a grey mist, and you feel a thick dampness in your lungs as you stand, cold and wet, in the afternoon dark."

Or said another way, "Consciousness gradually loses its coherence. One's center gives way. The center cannot hold. The "me" becomes a haze, and the solid center from which one experiences reality breaks up like a bad radio signal. There is no longer a sturdy vantage point from which to look out, take things in, assess what's happening. No core holds things together, providing the lens through which to see the world, to make judgments and comprehend risk".

The juxtaposition of the uncanny on the mundane is stark and arresting.