Success despite schizophrenia

Elyn Saks speaks at Trojan Parents Weekend event

—By Lori Craig

Professor Elyn Saks spoke about her lifelong struggle with schizophrenia and acute psychosis to an overflow crowd of 200 students and parents – in town for USC’s Trojan Parents Weekend – Oct. 10. She publicly announced her mental illness and chronicled her struggle with accepting it in her acclaimed memoir, The Center Cannot Hold (Hyperion, 2007).

Prof. Elyn Saks discusses her memoir The  Center Cannot Hold

Saks, who grew up in a loving household in Florida, said she started showing signs of mental illness as a young child. She had extreme phobias and night terrors as a child, and as a teen became anorexic and flirted with drug use.

One morning during her junior year of high school, Saks abruptly left class and decided to walk three miles home.

“As I walked along, I began to notice that the colors and shapes of everything around me were becoming very intense,” Saks read from her book. “And at some point, I began to realize that the houses I was passing were sending messages to me: Look closely. You are special. You are especially bad. Look closely and ye shall find. There are many things you must see. See. See.”

Yet Saks was always a successful student and graduated as class valedictorian  at Vanderbilt University.

“I fell in love with thinking, but there were portents of my mental illness even then,” Saks said.

Saks received a Marshall Scholarship and moved abroad to study philosophy at Oxford University. The move was traumatic, and she soon checked herself into the hospital and submitted to taking medication. She also found relief through psychoanalysis, a form of talk therapy that she continues today.

After graduating from Oxford with a Master’s of Letters in philosophy, Saks enrolled in Yale Law School. After suffering a psychotic break while at Yale, Saks for the first time was forcefully put in restraints by hospital staff. They kept her bound for about 20 hours of each of the following three days, and she was forced to take pills and held down to receive injections.

Saks signed copies of her book following  the talk

“When you get restrained, it depends more on the ethos of the hospital ward than the behavior of the patient,” Saks said.

During her hospitalization at Yale Psychiatric Institute, Saks finally received a diagnosis: Chronic paranoid schizophrenia with acute exacerbation. She was given a “very poor and grave prognosis.” In other words, she was expected to be unable to live independently, let alone work.

It wasn’t until she was in her 40s that Saks was able to admit to herself that she suffered from an illness that would not go away.

She had been hired as a tenure track professor at USC Law and found a psychoanalyst who treated her four or five days a week. His view: Stay on medication and move on with your life. Her view: The less medicine, the less defective.

Yet following another episode, which occurred at USC Law, Saks began taking a new medication, which proved effective and changed her perspective for good.

“I accepted fully that I had an illness,” Saks said. “Ironically, the more I accepted that I had an illness, the less if defined me.”

That acceptance allowed her to move forward, Saks said, and opened up new personal and professional possibilities. She found romance and has been married seven years, and is in training to be a psychoanalyst.

Saks took several questions from the audience. In response to a question about whether her intelligence helped her cope with the illness, Saks said it “cuts both ways.” While intelligence may help a people with schizophrenia understand their illness and continue to express themselves, it could also hurt in that debilitation might be a farther fall or a hit to the ego.

Her story has policy implications, Saks added, and is an example of the detriments of the use of mechanical restraints and the use of force on mental patients.

“We must invest more resources in the mental health system,” Saks said. “I think my story shows that. If we want people to be able to live up to their potential, we need to provide the resources for that.”

Following the talk, Saks signed copies of her critically acclaimed book. Earlier this year Saks received the 12th Annual Books For A Better Life Award in the inspirational category.