I was putting this off a while for when I was in an decent enough headspace to go through it. The author is an outlier of sorts in terms of what she has been able to accomplish as a person with severe schizophrenia (and anorexia and depression.) The great amount and quality of support around her throughout her life, her access to care, some personality traits, and some of her demographics helped to give her the ability to achieve more in academia and other spaces than the average human, let alone a human with severe mental illness.

Having people close to me as well as acquaintances with schizophrenia and also being a person who has been through a lot of pharmacological, physical, and psychological mental health treatment, I get it. Like the top review here says, schizophrenia meds in particular are heinous (one person I know was just diagnosed with parkinson's from their meds and others who I know will refuse meds until death despite being unhoused and in a paranoid hell) and it is no wonder Saks tried so many times to get off of them despite it never going well. This does make the book rather repetitive at times, but I think it works as a tool to drive home just how much this shit upends your life and robs choices from you. I am a person who has also been the exhausted, frustrated, and overstretched support person (while dealing with my own trash brain,) so I am not trying to say that's invalid. Just that anyone judging her should spend a month on heavy duty anti-psychotics and then tell us about if they want to spend the rest of the decades of their life like that.

I haven't read other things by her, but the book made me interested in her other takes on mental health and the law as well as what she feels could be done to improve specifically the USAmerican health system. I have read one other schizophrenia memoir long ago that was self published. I would like to see more memoirs out there from this perspective, especially from people who make up the larger majority of folks who aren't tenured professors. Nonetheless, I like that Saks used the advantages she has to give a more understandable platform to folks suffering with psychosis.