Elyn Saks Quotes

United States, Educator
1956

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.

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

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

Elyn Saks
- Mind

In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions.

Elyn Saks
- Up
- Good
- Parents
Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.

Elyn Saks
- Mind
- Powerful
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
- Life
- Up
My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.

Elyn Saks
- Experience
- Stop
- Brain
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.

Elyn Saks
- School
- Law
- Support
Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia.

Elyn Saks
- People

My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy.

Elyn Saks
- Mind
- Friend
- Enemy
Choose your friends wisely, and also choose friends that you can trust.

Elyn Saks
- Friends
- Trust
Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there, but the stigma is so great that they don't come forward.

Elyn Saks
- People
- Great
- Unique