USC Professor Wins Inspiration Award for Schizophrenia Memoir

USC Gould School Professor Elyn Saks won the 12th Annual Books For A Better Life Award in the inspirational category for her memoir The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, which chronicles her battle with schizophrenia.

Recognized by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Saks was one of five finalists in the inspiration category, which also included Lee and Bob Woodruff for the book In an Instant, which recorded Bob Woodruff’s rehabilitation from injuries suffered while covering the war in Iraq.

The awards recognize excellence in self-help, motivational and self-improvement books in nine categories. They were presented at a ceremony held in New York on Monday.

“This was a huge surprise, but I am deeply honored to receive this award,” said Saks. “I hope this will help others battling schizophrenia and also educate the public about the disease. The diagnosis of schizophrenia needn’t be a sentence to a bleak and painful life.”

Although Saks has enjoyed a lifetime of academic success — she was valedictorian at Vanderbilt University, at the top of her class at Yale Law School, and a Marshall scholar at Oxford, and today is a respected legal scholar at the USC Gould School of Law — she has battled schizophrenia since she was a young girl.

Saks said she wrote The Center Cannot Hold to be free of the secret she had kept for so long and to implode myths about mental illness.

“I wanted to write this book to give hope to people who suffer from schizophrenia and understanding to people who don’t,” said Saks, an expert in the field of mental health law with faculty appointments in a top medical school and psychology program.

Until the book was published last September, only Saks’ closest friends knew of her condition, which she controls with daily therapy and medication.

Schizophrenia affects approximately one percent of the world’s population — more than three million Americans — and is classified by the National Mental Health Institutes as one of the top 10 causes of disability in the developed world. A disorder of the brain, the illness causes psychotic episodes of varying duration and severity. Symptoms of a psychotic episode range from unusual thoughts or perceptions and inability to form coherent thoughts to hallucinations, delusions and significant movement disorders.

Saks was in her forties before she was able to admit to herself that her illness was not going away, and that medication and psychoanalysis would be necessary for the rest of her life.

“For 20 years,” Saks writes in her memoir, “I struggled with that acceptance, coming right up to it on some days, backing away from it on others. … Ironically, the more I accepted I had a mental illness, the less the illness defined me.”

Contact: Gilien Silsby, USC Gould School of Law, at (213) 740-9690, (213) 500-8673 (cell) or gsilsby@law.usc.edu