Elyn Saks: A Tale of Mental Illness from the Inside

July 5, 2012 by Gail
Filed under VidStyle

“Is it okay if I totally trash your office?” It’s a question Elyn Saks once asked her doctor, and it wasn’t a joke. A legal scholar, in 2007 Saks came forward with her own story of schizophrenia, controlled by drugs and therapy but ever-present. In this powerful talk, she asks us to see people with mental illness clearly, honestly and compassionately.

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ABOUT Elyn Saks

“As a mental health law scholar and writer, Elyn Saks speaks for the rights of mentally ill people. It’s a gray area: Too often, society’s first impulse is to make decisions on their behalf. But it’s a slippery slope from in loco parentis to a denial of basic human rights.

Elyn Saks has brilliantly argued for more autonomy and in many cases for a restoral of basic human dignity. In 2007, deep into her career, she dropped a bombshell–her autobiography, ‘The Center Cannot Hold’. In it, she reveals the depth of her own schizophrenia, now controlled by drugs and therapy.

Clear-eyed and honest about her own condition, the book lent her new ammunition in the quest to protect the rights and dignity of the mentally ill. She says “there’s a tremendous need to implode the myths of mental illness, to put a face on it, to show people that a diagnosis does not have to lead to a painful and oblique life”.

In recent years, researchers have begun talking about mental health care in the same way addiction specialists speak of recovery — the lifelong journey of self-treatment and discipline that guides substance abuse programmes. The idea remains controversial: managing a severe mental illness is more complicated than simply avoiding certain behaviours.

Approaches include “medication (usually), therapy (often), a measure of good luck (always) and, most of all, the inner strength to manage one’s demons, if not banish them”. That strength can come from any number of places, these former patients say: love, forgiveness, faith in God, a lifelong friendship. Saks says “we who struggle with these disorders can lead full, happy, productive lives, if we have the right resources”

The VIDEO