Elyn saks biography samples

Delusions and hallucinations are hallmarks of the illness. I sometimes have the idea that nuclear explosions are about to be set off in my brain. Occasionally, I have hallucinations, like one time I turned around and saw a man with a raised knife. Often, speech and thinking become disorganized to the point of incoherence. During her first year at Oxford, she started exhibiting symptoms indicative of depression and mild paranoia.

Eventually, it developed into something more like a thought disorder than a mood disorder. Elyn had her first hospitalization in America during her first year at Yale Law School. She asked her classmates if they were having the same experience of words jumping around the cases as she was. My head was too full of noise, too full of orange trees and law memos I could not write and mass murders I knew I would be responsible for.

He eventually brought her to the emergency room. Then they strapped my legs and arms to the metal bed with thick leather straps. This incident resulted in her involuntary hospitalization.

Elyn saks biography samples

She spent five months in a hospital ward, often restrained, up to 20 hours in mechanical restraints, arms and legs tied down with a net tied tightly across her chest. I never harmed anyone. I never made any direct threats. They strangle, they aspirate their vomit, they suffocate, they have a heart attack. For a long time, Elyn lived with her struggle secretly.

She shared her mental illness only with her family and closest friends. She was tired of hiding what she was thinking and feeling most of the time and tired of fearing what might happen if people discovered who she really was. So, eventually she began to think about writing her memoir The Center Cannot Hold, making public for the first time her lifelong struggle with schizophrenia, including severe episodes of psychosis as well as experiences with misguided or harmful treatments.

With her book, Elyn encouraged and helped her students pave their way. The Faculty Lounge. September 22, August 8, USC Contact. Spirit of the Law. Spring Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal. Psychiatric News. April Alabama Law Review. The New York Times. June Retrieved August 13, Archived from the original on August 17, Retrieved October 18, External links [ edit ].

Authority control databases. Categories : American legal scholars American women lawyers Living people MacArthur Fellows People with schizophrenia Schizophrenia researchers University of Southern California faculty American women legal scholars American women academics 21st-century American memoirists American lawyers with disabilities 21st-century American women writers Members of Phi Kappa Phi.

Hidden categories: Articles with short description Short description matches Wikidata Use mdy dates from December Articles with hCards Webarchive template wayback links Year of birth missing living people. The most traumatic experience was of being mechanically restrained. My first few days in the hospital I was restrained probably twenty hours a day.

Then for three weeks I was restrained maybe four to fifteen hours a day. These restraint episodes were extremely traumatic. It is frightening to be put and kept in restraints, causes feelings of degradation and helplessness, and over, say, ten hours is extremely painful.. This was the worst trauma I have ever been subjected to. I had nightmares about it for years and years.

In addition to my experiences of force, I also experienced losing any privacy. For instance, in the beginning I sometimes was watched when I showered and went to the bathroom. For a five or six week period in one hospital I was given no privacy in conversations—staff was present at every conversation I had, including with my parents. One thing force may do—and did to me in one respect—is to deter people from seeking treatment again.

I was fortunate that my analysts were all willing to take a risk for me and help me manage on my own, outside the hospital. My bottom line? I like to say that I am very pro-psychiatry but very anti-force. COOK: Can you please say more about your position on the rights of people with mental illness? SAKS: I am very focused on patient autonomy.

Maybe I am just very shame-prone, but, as I noted, the experiences I have had where force was used were very traumatic and shaming. At the same time, I believe that sometimes people lack the capacity to make their own decisions much of my research has focused on how to understand and measure such capacity. In that event, a benign other should decide for them.

Basically, I would relax the criteria for imposing these the first time someone becomes acutely psychotic. My rationale for this is that many people are grateful for forced treatment, and we should count that as a good outcome if they are. At that point they will have experienced both the ravages of the illness and the possible benefits of the treatment and are in the best position to decide what they would like for the future.

COOK: Can you give some examples of the ways your academic work and interests have been shaped by your illness? I initially focused on multiple personality disorder now called dissociative identity disorder , because I wanted to study something that would not be so close to home, and I thought the philosophical issues raised by the disorder were fascinating.

Over time I started to write about things that were closer to my heart, like forced treatment. I suppose that my own trauma around the use of force really motivated me to study this. I hope my experiences help my scholarship be better. I have been on all sides of the medication counter, so to speak: a patient, a lawyer for patients, a teacher about patients, a writer about patients, and a therapist for patients I did some clinical work in connection with my studies for a Ph.

COOK: Do you feel like your experience, both a patient and a scientist, might offer insights into what is happening in the brain of a schizophrenic? The study will compare me to ten others, half healthy controls and half controls with schizophrenia and similar demographics to my own. We are looking at three things: psychiatric evaluation; neuropsychological testing; and brain imaging e.