Author of the highly engrossing memoir about her battle with schizophrenia, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, Elyn R. Saks is the Orrin B. Evans Professor of Law and Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern California Law School.

She teaches law and mental health to law students, undergraduates, and psychiatry and psychology fellows.

In the best-selling The Center Cannot Hold, Saks reveals her journey of the horrors and demons of mental illness through the extraordinary perspective as both expert and sufferer.

In revealing her powerful story, she has become an advocate for mental patients' civil rights and is striving to dispel the myths surrounding an illness that affects 3 million Americans.

“For 20 years I struggled with acceptance... Ironically, the more I accepted I had a mental illness, the less the illness defined me — at which point the riptide set me free,” she says.

Saks writes extensively in the area of law and mental health. She has published two books, on multiple personality disorder and criminal law and on hermeneutic psychoanalysis, and has just completed a third book, titled Law, Ethics, and Severe Mental Illness: Questioning Our Values. She has also published numerous articles.

In addition, Saks is Co-PI of the Bioethics Core of the University of California, San Diego’s Geriatric Psychiatry Interventions Research Center.

Currently, she is collaborating with other members of the Core on a research project to measure the appreciation component of capacity to decide on psychiatric research in middle-aged and older patients with psychosis. Saks was recently elected to the American Law Institute.

Also a Research Clinical Associate at the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Saks received a BA in philosophy from Vanderbilt University; an M.Litt. in philosophy from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall Scholar; and a JD from Yale Law School.

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