Elyn Saks Quotes

Elyn Saks — American Educator

Elyn R. Saks is Associate Dean and Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Gould Law School, an expert in mental health law and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship winner. Saks lives with schizophrenia and has written about her experience with the illness in her award-winning best-selling autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold, published by Hyperion Books in 2007. Saks is also a cancer survivor... (wikipedia)

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven.

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia.

I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

Elyn Saks Quotes

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