Elyn Saks

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

— Elyn Saks

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

— Elyn Saks

Portray [people with mental illness] sympathetically, and portray them in all the richness and depth of their experience as people, and not…

— Elyn Saks

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

— Elyn Saks

There are not schizophrenics. There are people with schizophrenia and these people may be your spouse, they may be your child, they…

— Elyn Saks

Everyone becomes psychotic in his or her own ways.

— 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…

— 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…

— 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…

— Elyn Saks

One of the reasons the doctors gave for hospitalizing me against my will was that I was ‘gravely disabled.’ To support this…

— 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

Some people say I'm unique, that there aren't other people with schizophrenia like me. Well, there are people like me out there,…

— Elyn Saks

In a way, I had a very good and normal childhood. I had loving and caring parents. But I had a lot…

— 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

I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living…

— Elyn Saks