Esmé Weijun Wang

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.

Essays

The Collected Schizophrenias

Syrina

Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, but I've always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that i’m not pioneering an  inexplicable experience.

He told me that my problem was obvious: it was a classic case of a Fire typology that had burned out of control, therefore explaining my ambitious personality, pain, inflammation, anxiety, depression, and symptoms of schizophrenia. He indicated a few acupressure points that I could try, including one in the dip of my sternum called the Sea of Tranquility. He advised me to eat less meat and fewer spices. I sipped a chai latte from a to-go cup in his office, and between sips I became anxious that he would smell the chai on my breath, and chide me for feeding an already raging conflagration. 

Sartre claimed, “we are our choices,” but what has a person become when it’s assumed that said person is innately incapable of choice?

The Collected Schizophrenias quotes

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