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 ba…

- Elyn Saks

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

- 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

My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.

- 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 U…

- Elyn Saks

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

- 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 ch…

- 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 diagno…

- Elyn Saks