The collected schizophrenias: essays

Book Cover
Average Rating
Publisher
Graywolf Press
Publication Date
[2019]
Language
English

Description

"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"-- Publisher's description.

Published Reviews

Booklist Review

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, schizophrenia afflicts 1.1-percent of the American adult population. In this moving memoir about broken brains, Wang, a self-described overachieving daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, reveals that she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder eight years after experiencing her first hallucinations. It is terrifying when the mind loses the ability to make rational decisions, she notes. By describing her own experiences and referring to pop culture, from such films as The Exorcist and Lucy to such books as Joan Didion's Blue Nights and Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, Wang makes the reader feel what it's like to lose your mind and its frightening consequences (she was hospitalized against her will on three occasions). But she also had to overcome her culture's reticence about mental illness ( We don't talk about these things, her mother said). Worse, Wang observes that the only time she sees schizophrenics in the news is when they commit mass shootings or other acts of horrific violence. She also discusses how she compensates for her condition. Working for someone else in a high-stress environment (she uses McDonald's as an example), she would rapidly begin to decompensate, but allowing her to work for herself exerts less pressure on my mind. An invaluable work.--June Sawyers Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
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Publisher's Weekly Review

In this penetrating and revelatory exploration, novelist Wang (The Border of Paradise) shows how having a bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder has permeated her life. Stating that "my brain has been one of my most valuable assets since childhood," she writes with blunt honesty about striving to be seen as "high functioning," aware that "the brilliant facade of a good face and a good outfit" drastically affects how she is perceived. She explains her decision not to have children, while recalling time spent working at a camp for bipolar children, and muses about viewing her condition as a manifestation of "supernatural ability" rather than a hindrance. Wang invariably describes her symptoms and experiences with remarkable candor and clarity, as when she narrates a soul-crushing stay in a Louisiana mental hospital and the alarming onset of a delusion in which "the thought settles over me, fine and gray as soot, that I am dead." She also tackles societal biases and misconceptions about mental health issues, criticizing involuntary commitment laws as cruel. Throughout these essays, Wang trains a dispassionate eye onto her personal narrative, creating a clinical remove that allows for the neurotypical reader's greater comprehension of a thorny and oft-misunderstood topic. Agent: Jin Auh, the Wylie Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Kirkus Book Review

A collection of autobiographical essays on schizophrenia, which "shirks reality in favor of its own internal logic."In addition to a detailed history of the treatment of mental illness in America, informed by her time as a researcher at Stanford, Wang (The Border of Paradise, 2016) keenly investigates the lived experience of "the schizophrenias." Covering a variety of issuesincluding the practice of involuntary committal and life in a psychiatric institution, the difficulties of navigating college with a mental disorder, the public discourse on suicide, the financial problems caused by a chronic illness and an uncaring insurance industrythe author consistently demonstrates her precise attunement to not only the stories buried in official statistics and dry historical sources, but also to the broader implications of her own personal experiences. Unfortunately, Wang's prose is often clinical when it needs to be harrowing or affective when it needs to be precise, and the transition from the macro view to the micro is occasionally inelegant. What makes these essays worthwhile is their attention to both the broad historical and cultural implications of their subject matter and the personal, first-person perspective that is so often lost in historical accounts. The author is an adroit researcher and an exacting describer, but the two halves often fail to mesh effectively, as when she writes that "with chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition." Such sentences attempt to swerve from direct exposition to personal reflection yet do not fully manage the transition, leaving a highly personal anecdote dressed in too-clinical description. Still, the book remains a necessary antidote to the often ignorant and fearmongering depictions of mental illness in popular culture.Better integration of the two thematic halves and prose that was more lively and varied would have made the collection truly great, but even so it remains quite powerful and certainly useful for fellow sufferers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
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