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Elyn Saks Summary

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The TED talk I have watched and will review is “Elyn Saks: A tale of mental illness — from the inside.” Elyn Saks introduces herself to the audience saying she has chronic schizophrenia. When she was younger, she has spent a lot of time in hospitals. She said that she could have ended up being hospitalized for the rest of her life. Luckily, she hasn’t been there for almost thirty years, but she has not been clear of all psychiatric symptoms. Schizophrenia is not the same as multiple personality disorder, but the mind of someone struggling with schizophrenia, “is not split but shattered” (Elyn Saks 3:57). Multiple personality disorder is described as the presence of two or more different personality states. While schizophrenia impacts the way a person thinks, feels, and behaves.
Many homeless people have some sort of schizophrenia, but people who are working as professionals struggle with it too. Elyn Saks shared some of her experiences with the audience, starting with one of her episodes when she was in college. She made plans with her two friends to study in the Yale law school library. She said she had began to talk in ways that made no sense, and had frightened her friends. Another experience Elyn Saks had was when she had gone to see her professor, she had began to talk in unknown speech. He sent her to the emergency …show more content…

For years, she had withstanded medication trying to convince everyone else that she was not struggling with any mental illness. She had more episodes during this time when she was with other people. She saw Dr. Marder and when in his office, began to mutter. She broke down in front of her friends and family and they had convinced her to take medication. Some of her close friends and family members know her illness and she says, “these relationships have given my life a meaning and a depth”

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Elyn Saks is a very accomplished woman. She has managed to become a published author and an esteemed college professor while suffering from schizophrenia. Her book, The Center Cannot Hold discusses her life as she fought and eventually managed her mental illness. Saks lived a normal childhood with caring parents, but she does recall having several phobias and obsessions when she was younger that were not healthy or normal in their longevity. As Saks matured, her schizophrenic episodes worsened.

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In Schiller’s case, she began to develop symptoms of Schizophrenia at the young age of 17. When she first experienced “The Voices” as she calls them, she was working at a summer camp. She was in the process of dealing with a breakup when in the middle of the night, she heard a powerful Voice say “You must die!” (Schiller, L., 6). The Voices continually screamed obscene profanity at her until she would leave her room and run outside onto a trampoline and jumped until she was physically exhausted.

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Schizophrenia is where the individual has hallucinations, delusion, and severe disorganization. Bipolar disorder is where the individual has the ability to change their current mood to extremely high to extremely low. The bipolar illness causes

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She proceeds to explain the contributing factors of the narrator succumbing to her “disease” of hysteria which was isolation from social interaction and the restriction of her own thoughts. She points out that the narrator is confined to a simple square room with nothing to offer in terms of mental health therapy. The narrator’s lack of the ability to interact with anything or anyone leads to infatuation with the wallpaper, which turns out to be “the

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Schizophrenia is an ominous word often associated with psychosis, delusions, as well as paranoia. Society supposedly understands how horrible symptoms like these make schizophrenia one of the worst mental diseases that one could live with, and the story of Elyn Saks is definitely no exception. In the memoir The Center Cannot Hold, Elyn R. Saks brings her readers through the harsh realities of living with schizophrenia, while also dealing with the stresses associated with high school, getting a college degree, while still maintaining relationships with family and friends. Saks had inadequate care as a child when her symptoms first began appearing, and being transferred through countries following school, and being passed from doctor to doctor

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The narrator is certain she is really sick, and not just nervously depressed as diagnosed by her husband, but she is confined by her role as a wife and woman, and cannot convince her relatives and friends that something is actually wrong with her. In the story the narrator says, “”If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the

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As mentioned above every time Saks faced a new transition in her life and or extremely stressful situation she was aware that a psychotic break could be possible and that was one of her many challenges that she faced daily. Saks also battled with a love, hate relationship towards medication, she knew the importance of it, but she was also extremely mindful of the side effects that came with medication. Kalpan and white constantly asked her to please take the recommended doses of the medication that they were telling her to take. Saks wanted to get through her situation without taking medication, she believed that if she took medication that it would mean that she is a

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At the beginning of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the woman writes of her husband’s diagnosis for her illness saying, “If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression-- a slight hysterical tendency-- what is one to do?”(Lynch para.

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Deemed “ill”, the narrator is forced into rest cure, “So I take phosphates or phosphites – whichever it is, and tonics, and journeys, and air, and exercise, and am absolutely forbidden to ‘work’ until I am well again.” (Gilman 1). The forced confinement and the absence of “congenial work, with excitement and change” (Gilman 1) drive the narrator deeper into insanity as the story progress. Convinced by her husband and brother, who are established physicians of “high standing” (Gilman 1), the narrator starts to believe she is actually mentally ill. Thus, as Janet’s theory suggests, the narrator’s own belief that she is mentally ill, “patients own idea of pathology”, results in her showing signs of hysteria, “translated into physical disability” (Tasca et al. 114).

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Being a woman in the early twentieth century, she simply followed what her husband told her. She did not have her own voice and kept her thoughts to herself. With that being said, it is as if her identity is simply that of the average woman during her time. However, the days she spends in confinement go by, the identity of that woman drifts away and she is overtaken by the identity of her own mental illness. As said in Diana Martin’s journal on “Images in Psychiatry”, while the narrator in isolation she becomes “increasingly despondent and nervous”.

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The reader of this story can tell this woman is not only suffering from insanity, but also loneliness. She often finds herself crying and says, “I cry at nothing, and I cry most of the time.” She attempts to tell her husband how she is feeling but she is unable to, she says “I was crying before I had finished.” (681) the reader can see how this woman is upset and it is not only due to her illness. Infect, the woman makes many comments about how her husband is not reassuring.

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