The Collected Schizophrenias

When a friend first handed me her copy of Esmé Weijun Wang’s book, I imagined it would sit unread on my shelf for a long time. Given how much time I spend in my professional life working with people with severe mental illness, I assumed Wang’s personal account of her struggle to find a diagnosis and effective, compassionate treatment would be redundant for me.

I was so, so, so wrong. I read nearly the entire essay collection in one sitting—it is stunning, somehow scholarly and deeply personal at the same time. The book is required reading for anyone who wants… show more.

As you probably deduced from the title, this book focuses on schizophrenia, not bipolar disorder. But it is the best mental health memoir I’ve ever read. I keep multiple copies so I can hand them out to my friends. Esmé Weijun Wang is a beautiful writer, and the book contains deep, insightful reflections on the weight of stigma and the nature of a psychiatric diagnosis.

A truly insightful book—it is not a memoir—but rather a type of philosophical inquiry about living with schizoaffective disorder, and trying to make sense of the nonsensical, and order the disordered. This is both the work of an analytic researcher and the personal narrative of a person hoping to correct the misconceptions and branding of schizophrenia, but she writes beautifully and poignantly about the identity and branding of the mentally ill, and the stigma of chronic illness. My favorite writing about mental illness is writing done from inside the suffering, and Wang does that here, especially when she’s under the… show more.

In this clear-eyed series of essays about living with a form of schizophrenia, author Esmé Weijun Wang leverages her own stories to expose and critique the ways she has been misunderstood and condemned for her illness. Sharing anecdotes about life as an inpatient, as a student, and as a wife, she reveals the ways she compensates for the delusions and hallucinations that plague her, as well as the sense of separation and exclusion that these symptoms and others’ attitudes engender. Often foregrounding the intensity of her many challenges and openly confronting her uncertainty about her future, she nonetheless writes with… show more.