“Having an open day, day after day, week after week, where you don’t have any plans or you don’t have any goals, or you don’t have any structures, is very debilitating and painful,” she explained.
#Schizophrenia success story full#
Structure and a full schedule reduced the frequency of her episodes. Saks noticed that “the crazy stuff recedes to the sidelines” when she focused on writing an argument. “How much more stressful would it be to have a line of people (at the cash register) demanding change?” “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve been a student all my life. “It felt like a sentence to a bleak and painful life,” she said.īut when a Yale psychiatrist suggested she not return to school and take a job as a cashier, something inside her rebelled. Then she received her schizophrenia diagnosis.
Saks is now an outspoken advocate against the use of physical restraints, hoping others can be spared what she calls “the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to me.” She was kept in restraints for hours every day, an experience that she described as incredibly painful, terrifying and degrading. It would never occur to me that someone would do that kind of thing to a person.” “They came in and they lifted me high off the ground and slammed me down in a bed, and tied my wrists and my ankles with a net across my chest to the bed,” she recounted. When she refused to give over her belt to an attendant, they called security. No such luck with a psychotic episode.”Īfter she said other scary and dangerous things, one of her professors brought her to the emergency room. “Only with a nightmare, you sit up in bed and open your eyes and it goes away. “It’s like a waking nightmare with all the odd, bizarre, scary things happening,” Saks explained. I don’t believe in joints, but they do hold your body together.”
She remembers turning to one of her classmates one day and asking: “Are your copies of the legal cases being infiltrated like mine are? We’ve gotta case the joint. “I didn’t think I should talk because I thought speaking would spread my evil around,” she said. But then her symptoms began to reflect more a disorder of thought than of mood. Her 5-foot-10-inch body shed weight until she was under 100 pounds. At first, it looked like severe depression with mild paranoia, she said. Saks’ illness crept up as she pursued her education. But as she works to prove, schizophrenia isn’t quite what it’s been made out to be. The effects can be so devastating that many with schizophrenia have been told by doctors - as Saks once was - that they may never lead independent lives, find partners or hold down stable jobs.īy that kind of conventional psychiatric thinking, the story of Elyn Saks - a woman who studied as a Marshall scholar at Oxford University, graduated from Yale Law School, wrote a best-selling book and was awarded a MacArthur “genius” grant - is nearly impossible. Symptoms include hallucinations and hearing voices, paranoia, jumbled thoughts and catatonia (being unable to respond to others). Saks is one of an estimated 2.4 million Americans who have schizophrenia, a chronic and severe brain disorder that causes people to “lose touch” with reality. “I had occasional hallucinations - a man standing with a knife raised above my head.” “I frequently had the delusion that I killed hundreds of thousands of people with my thoughts,” she said. She was 16 years old, and with time, those kinds of thoughts became increasingly disturbing and intrusive. “I felt like entities were putting thoughts in my head, and it was upsetting and scary.” “One day in the middle of school, (I) just got up and started walking five miles home, and I felt like the houses were sending me messages. Elyn Saks still remembers one of her earliest schizophrenic episodes, though she didn’t realize what it was.
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