Elyn Saks Quotes & Sayings

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare. — Elyn Saks

Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness. — Elyn Saks

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States. — Elyn Saks

Choose your friends wisely, and also choose friends that you can trust. — Elyn Saks

Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia. — Elyn Saks

Even with all that - excellent treatment, wonderful family and friends, supportive work environment - I did not make my illness public until relatively late in life, and that's because the stigma against mental illness is so powerful that I didn't feel safe with people knowing. If you hear nothing else today, please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics'. There are people with schizophrenia, and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they may be your neighbor, they may be your friend, they may be your coworker. — Elyn Saks

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses. — Elyn Saks

Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed. — Elyn Saks

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was 'gravely disabled.' To support this view, they wrote in my chart that I was unable to do my Yale Law School homework. I wondered what that meant about much of the rest of New Haven. — Elyn Saks

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways. — Elyn Saks

Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there, but the stigma is so great that they don't come forward. — Elyn Saks

My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission. — Elyn Saks

My mind has been both my best friend and my worst enemy. — Elyn Saks

In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot of quirks or problems when I was growing up. I had phobias and obsessions. — Elyn Saks

I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently. — Elyn Saks