2. The Centre Cannot Hold - Elyn Saks
For me, this is the most inspirational book of the lot. Elyn Saks, a highly acclaimed and decorated academic, talks frankly about her experiences with struggling against severe schizophrenia and concurrently her struggles to make it in the academic world in the face of her suffering and torment. Schizophrenia is the most horrific and debilitating mental illness of them all. Elyn had problems as a child but it wasn't until she was at Oxford University on a post graduate scholarship that the voices began to torment her as well as suicidal ideation. She had a stay in a psychiatric hospital. Despite this, Elyn was able to attend Yale Law School. She had further schizophrenic attacks and one occasion she was put into four-point restraints and spent five months in a mental ward. Elyn did not give in and fought against the illness to confound the experts and become a Professor of both Law and Psychiatry. It was a tremendously brave of Elyn Saks to recount her battle with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder in her current job. As a highly qualified academic she will face a lot of stigma and derision. But her memoir is bound to give hope to many people with a schizophrenic illness. In the book, Elyn is as sick as a person can be with schizophrenia but some inner force or intestinal fortitude keeps her going and achieve her goals. The book is unique in that it is a first person narrative of surviving schizophrenia. There are a lot of books on surviving bipolar written first person, but books that deal with first person schizophrenia are rare. The Centre Cannot Hold is destined to be a mental health memoir classic.