Elyn Saks is Associate Dean of the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California.  Her research and teaching focus on the ethics of psychiatric research and involuntary treatment of the mentally ill.  She herself was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young woman and dealt with stigma, self-doubt, and forced restraint before medication and psychotherapy aided her to successfully self-manage her illness.  Her books include:  Refusing Care: Forced Treatment and the Rights of the Mentally Ill; Interpreting Interpretation: The Limits of Hermeneutic Psychoanalysis: and Jekyll on Trial: Multiple Personality Disorder and Criminal Law.
Her much-acclaimed 2007 memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness, is an honest and inspiring account of her struggles and her achievements.  She was honored in September, 2009 with a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
 
View the video of her interview conducted by Alysa Solomon of the LAC Department of Mental Health:
 
 

Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health interviews Elyn Saks, JD. from Alysa Solomon