"My name is Elyn. They used to call me 'Elyn, Elyn, watermelon.' At school. Where I used to go. When I am now and having trouble.'
"What kind of trouble?" she asked.
"There's trouble. Right here in River City. Home of the New Haveners. Where there is no heaven, new or old. I'm just looking for a haven. Can you give me a haven? Aren't you too young? Why are you crying? I cry because the voices are at the end of time. Time is too old. I've killed lots of people."
And later.
"There's the killing fields," I said. "Heads exploding. I didn't do anything wrong. They just said 'quake, fake, lake.' I used to ski. Are you trying to kill me?"
Forgive me, reader, it has been more than a month since my last post. Just hasn't been much time for reading. I only made it through one book this month, but I enjoyed it.
Elyn Saks is a Professor of Law, Psychology, and Psychiatry at the University of Southern California, has degrees from Vanderbilt, Oxford and Yale. She is currently working on a doctorate in psychoanalysis. She is happily married. These describe Saks, but in the process of achieving all this she also battled the onset and diagnosis of schizophrenia, a psychological condition more often associated with the homeless than with college professors with lengthy publication records. She hid her condition from others while in school and while first at her teaching position at USC, but at the same time she was working through psychoanalysis and finally decided that a drug regimen would keep her symptoms at a level that allowed her to be successful at the things she enjoyed.
I was struck by a couple of details of Saks story. One was that she assumed that everyone had the same demons that she did, and that she was just bad at handling them while everyone else was doing fine. This seems typical for all of us, that everyone else knows how to navigate life and we weren't given the instruction manual. In her case, the path she was trying to navigate was not typical, not by a long shot.
The other thing I noticed was strong denial. In Saks' case she denied to herself that she needed medication. She was raised to believe that we can rise above anything with hard work, and so she continues to believe that if she works hard enough, she can function well without drugs. We all deny something. For me, it is denying that I need to take care of myself better. If I just take care of everyone else, I will be fine. I need to come to grips with that denial.
Saks tells of growing up in Florida, the first inklings of the symptoms of schizophrenia, which are sometimes indistinguishable from ordinary teenage angst, her struggles in college in Tennessee, and full-fledged psychosis and hospitalization. Her scholarship in law school and after are focused on the rights of the mentally ill, in particular, the ability to refuse medication, restraints and hospitalization.
I particularly enjoyed the narrator of this recorded book, Alma Cuervo. I don't know if her voice matches that of Saks or not, but the narration was top notch, making me believe I was listening to the author. The quote above is typical of what Saks would ramble on about when she was having a pshychotic episode, and Cuervo's delivery of these were both frightening and believable.
This is an intelligent and sensitive story. Her descriptions of her psychotic states were illuminating. The writing is of the caliber of Jill Ker Conway (see "True North" and "Coorain"). I bought this recorded book because it was on sale, but it would have been a good buy even at full price.
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