The Collected Schizophrenias

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Thirteen essays on schizophrenia. From inside it. No comfort.

For you if

you want to understand schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder from inside the experience — written with the precision of a scientist and the honesty of someone who has nothing left to protect

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Schizophrenia is not a single diagnosis — it is a family of conditions whose boundaries the medical community itself disputes — and Wang, who has schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, and late-stage Lyme disease, writes about all of them from inside. She was a lab researcher at Stanford before her diagnosis and brings that analytical precision to thirteen essays that move from the journey toward diagnosis to the depths of a rare form of psychosis to the specific social labor of using fashion to appear high-functioning in a world that cannot see what she is managing. She examines the medical system's failures, the dangers of institutionalization, the way mental illness intersects with race and class and gender in ways that determine who gets believed and who gets locked up. The most rigorously intelligent and formally beautiful essay collection about schizophrenic disorders ever written — honest about what the illness takes and what it leaves, and completely without the inspirational arc that the genre usually demands. Winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the Whiting Award.

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