Mental Health: Nonfiction

The Col­lect­ed Schiz­o­phre­nias
writ­ten by Esmé Wei­jun Wang
Gray­wolf Press, 2019
(schiz­o­phre­nia, for adults) 

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.