Memoir about life with schizophrenia honored in mental health category
—By Elly Wong
USC Law Professor Elyn Saks’ acclaimed memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, recently won first place in its category in the USABookNews.com’s “National Best Books 2008 Awards.”
USABookNews.com, an online magazine and review website for mainstream and independent publishing houses, awarded The Center Cannot Hold as the “Best Book of 2008” in the Health: Psychology/Mental Health category.
Although Saks has enjoyed a lifetime of academic success — she was valedictorian at Vanderbilt University, at the top of her class at Yale Law School, a Marshall scholar at Oxford, and today is a respected legal scholar at the USC Gould School of Law — she also has battled schizophrenia since she was a young girl.
In her book, Saks writes about her life journey with schizophrenia and acute psychosis, hoping to put a human face on mental illnesses and help people to better understand them.
Saks said she wrote The Center Cannot Hold to be free of the secret she had kept for so long and to implode myths about mental illness.
“I wanted to write this book to give hope to people who suffer from schizophrenia and understanding to people who don’t,“ said Saks, an expert in the field of mental health law with faculty appointments in a top medical school and psychology program.
The website gave awards to books in more than 120 categories for titles published in 2008 and late 2007. A complete list of the winners and finalists of the USABookNews.com National “Best Books” 2008 Awards are available online at http://www.USABookNews.com.
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