Product Description

Elyn Saks is Professor of Law and Psychiatry at University of Southern California Law School. She's the author of several books. Happily married. And - a schizophrenic. Saks lifts the veil on schizophrenia with her startling and honest account of how she learned to live with this debilitating disease. With a coolly clear, measured tone she talks about her condition, the stigma attached and the deadening effects of medication. Her controlled narrative is disrupted by interjections from the part of her mind she has learned to suppress. Delusions, hallucinations and threatening voices cut into her reality and Saks, in a remarkably vivid way, enables us to hear and see them too. This is a powerful book that is as informative as it is moving. There are parallels with Jane Lapotaire's Time Out of Mind and with Girl, Interrupted.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #327490 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 313 pages

Review
'Schizophrenia is an ominous word - and we too often equate it with a life of misery, isolation and psychotic torment. I know of no better corrective to this than GOING SANE, a detailed memoir of how, with medication, sensitive support (and, in Prof. Saks' case, psychoanalysis), a deeply schizophrenic person can achieve a life full of creative work and love and friendships. It is the most lucid and hopeful memoir of living with schizophrenia I have ever read' Oliver Sacks "This is a remarkable narrative of a lived life. Written from the interior of the mental health field, as well as from many years at its periphery, it documents an extraordinary experience of continuous rites of passage, managed against a background of se

About the Author
Elyn Saks is a professor at the University of Southern California Law School and the University of California, and Research Clinical Associate at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She studied at Oxford and at Yale Law School and has published three books.

Customer Reviews

A message of hope
Anyone who has lived with someone suffering from this illness can benefit from reading this, it is a privelige to be invited into the private world of this articulate and intelligent woman. I felt very moved and she recounts the struggles with her demons and her attempts to overcome without medication. Eventually reconciling with the need for medication and the psychoanalysis that she persistently sought. The message of hope is that, yes, with this
most dreadful of mental illness one can live a fulfilled life and take one's
place in the world. The insight into the feelings and thoughts during a psychotic breakdown will change forever how you attempt to be there for those who are close to you with this illness, like myself a mother of son with schizophrenia.