A Memoir of Schizophrenia
A review of Esmé Weijun Wang’s powerful “The Collected Schizophrenias”
I have been psychically lost in a pitch-dark room. There is the ground, which may be nowhere other than immediately below my own numbed feet. Those foot-shaped anchors are the only trustworthy landmarks. If I make a wrong move, I’ll have to face the gruesome consequence. In this bleak abyss the key is to not be afraid, because fear, though inevitable, only compounds the awful feeling of being lost.
That is Esmé Weijun Wang’s early description of her suffering as a person diagnosed with schizophrenia. Like the rest of the book, it is raw and unfiltered. Wang is a writer by trade, and she uses her experience with a psychological disorder to write The Collected Schizophrenias, a collection of essays that is both a memoir of her life with schizophrenia and an exploration of the disease itself, scientifically and in popular understanding.
Wang, first diagnosed with “schizophrenia, undifferentiated type” before the DSM 5 (the diagnostic manual used by psychologists to define psychological disorders) changed in 2013 and, combined with some shifts in the presentation of her…
