The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
2019 • 224 pages
Ratings13
Average rating4.5
15
Ratings13
Average rating4.5
Powerful, affecting essays on mental illness, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and a Whiting Award An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esmé Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the “collected schizophrenias” but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community’s own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of schizophrenia in her life. In essays that range from using fashion to present as high-functioning to the depths of a rare form of psychosis, and from the failures of the higher education system and the dangers of institutionalization to the complexity of compounding factors such as PTSD and Lyme disease, Wang’s analytical eye, honed as a former lab researcher at Stanford, allows her to balance research with personal narrative. An essay collection of undeniable power, The Collected Schizophrenias dispels misconceptions and provides insight into a condition long misunderstood.
Reviews with the most likes.
For the Read Harder Challenge: A book by or about someone who identifies as neurodiverse. This is a collection of personal essays about Wang's life with schizoaffective disorder, Lyme disease, and PTSD. Such a strong and intelligent work.
This book is a personal recollection of the schizophrenias, i.e., the diseases that were created to explain the phenomena of a recurrent cluster of symptoms. The narratives of the delusions, hallucinations, the comorbidity of schizophrenia with other psychiatric diseases is authentic and it resonates with experiences of psychosis recorded elsewhere. The author also points to new scientific and non-scientific directions of the analysis of the schizophrenias and their treatment. It's a short, but fantastic book, that makes the discussion of schizophrenias in mainstream less fantastical and more realistic, displaying the suffering that usually follows these diseases.
