Speakers Elyn Saks: Mental health law scholar
Elyn Saks asks bold questions about how society treats people with mental illness.
Why you should listen to her:
As a law scholar and writer, Elyn Saks speaks for the rights of mentally ill people. It's a gray area: Too often, society's first impulse is to make decisions on their behalf. But it's a slippery slope from in loco parentis to a denial of basic human rights. Saks has brilliantly argued for more autonomy -- and in many cases for a restoration of basic human dignity.
In 2007, deep into her career, she dropped a bombshell -- her autobiography, The Center Cannot Hold. In it, she reveals the depth of her own schizophrenia, now controlled by drugs and therapy. Clear-eyed and honest about her own condition, the book lent her new ammunition in the quest to protect the rights and dignity of the mentally ill.
Read more on io9.com: I’m Elyn Saks and this is what it’s like to live with schizophrenia >>
"Saks has worked for years advocating for men and women with psychological illnesses, and she wrote this brutally honest book partly to make a public statement that no one suffering from any disorder, mental or physical, should be stigmatized."E. Bukowsky, Amazon.com reviewer
Quotes by Elyn Saks
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“Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.”
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“Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not as diagnoses.”
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“Please hear this: There are not ‘schizophrenics,’ there are people with schizophrenia.”
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“Occupying my mind with complex problems has been my best and most powerful and most reliable defense against my mental illness.”
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“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.”
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“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.”
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Elyn Saks: A tale of mental illness -- from the inside
- 14:52 Posted: Jun 2012
Elyn Saks on the Web
Related Speakers
Conferences
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- TEDGlobal 2012