The Center Cannot Hold

I'd like to meet Elyn. My view of the world is in many ways different than hers but I think we could have an interesting conversation about it.

I am less comfortable with the concept of mental illness (Thomas Szasz [b:The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct|706525|The Myth of Mental Illness Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct|Thomas Szasz|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347569090s/706525.jpg|1707969] appears on my "currently reading" list) than she is. She talks a lot about her psychoanalysis but, though it appears that she is revealing everything, I suspect there's a lot in her analysis that she does not talk about. At least I hope there is since, were I here analyst, there are many topics I'd want to cover. I'll only mention one. Her relationship with her parents in the book is a little too rosy. Considering some of the stories she tells, with a positive spin of sorts, I believe they must have made her feel terribly alone and unseen, and I'm talking about the time >before< she had her first psychotic break.

No, I'll mention a second. Her competitiveness and her retreat to unreality in response to even mild criticism (she is much more resilient under actual attack!) is a constant thread in her life and she never seems to analyze it (at least in the text of the book.)

My unreal fantasy (See? You don't need a diagnosis to have unreal fantasies.) is that I could help her recovery. Among other things, like her Mrs. Jones, I believe her persecutorial internal objects need to be reowned by her. She has a lot of rage with which she invests these imagined monsters and I'd like to know what it is about. I suspect it may be related to how she wasn't understood or seen growing up. She thinks that her parents were loving is sufficient, but to be loved but not seen isn't a trivial thing.

Still, her book is quite engaging and I'm glad she's out there fighting the good fight.

This is an astonishing and illuminating memoir of a woman with great gifts who also happens to be schizophrenic. Saks describes the sensations involved very well, and does an excellent job of making it clear that people with mental illness, while not always able to manage, should not be treated like dangerous freaks but with compassion and understanding. She provides a telling comparison of care of the mentally ill in the UK and US because she was first hospitalized when she was on a Mellon fellowship at Oxford. There the doors weren’t locked, medication wasn’t forced, and the patients were treated with some dignity; in the US, in contrast, while a law student at Yale, she was placed in restraints for days at a time, forcibly medicated, and essentially taught that the best thing to do was to avoid letting anyone know what was going on inside her head - not the best way to deal with scary feelings.returnreturnThe sensitive work of several psychoanalysts, the care of friends, and medication, combined with her own inner strength and intelligence, pulled her through some very difficult times. She is particularly informative about the emotional cost of having to take medication for the rest of one’s life - her discussion of why that’s so difficult really helps explain why going off meds is so persistently tempting for so many people.returnreturnOne in five families in the US is affected by major mental illness. This book could be enormously helpful in understanding the issues because Saks does such a good job of explaining what schizophrenia feels like - and how other people’s reactions can help or hurt. It’s an engrossing, wonderfully written memoir besides. Highly recommended.