She speculates that her own psychiatrist, having treated her for years for bipolar disorder, may have shied away from assigning a different disease: “I believe she was wary of officially shifting me from the more common terrain of mood and anxiety disorders to the wilds of the schizophrenias, which would subject me to self-censure and stigma from others.” Wang deftly articulates how a diagnosis can shift a patient’s sense of self, prompting simultaneous confusion and relief. She begins “The Collected Schizophrenias” with a meditation on the question of diagnosis. Wang is certain of her fragility, but she cannot always parse where it begins and ends. While some might dismiss this characterization-indeed, some reject the notion that schizophrenia is a sickness at all-Wang embraces it: “Under its auspices, I remain a rare bird who . . . The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, a clinical diagnostic tool created by the American Psychiatric Association, emphasizes that schizoaffective disorder portends “a lifetime of illness, and not an episode of illness,” Wang writes. Saks’s “ The Center Cannot Hold,” two books that elucidate the experiences of high-functioning women whose minds are both their proudest assets and their biggest liabilities. Her book, in offering hers, joins a small but significant canon, including Kay Redfield Jamison’s “ An Unquiet Mind” and Elyn R. Wang says that it is far more common for people who suffer from mental illness to be written about-by caregivers, by researchers-than to offer their own accounts. Wang’s recently published essay collection, “ The Collected Schizophrenias,” explores the peculiar questions of identity that the ill, and especially the mentally ill, must contend with. “What I feared was the in-between space: a purgatory for those too sick to truly live.” “I was so sick for so many days that I could feel hopelessness nipping at my edges,” Wang wrote in the Catapult essay, of one particularly rough period. Her symptoms sometimes got worse with treatment instead of better. In the past two decades, Wang has been committed to a mental hospital three times. When she began to experience new symptoms-weakness and fatigue, peripheral neuropathy, fainting, extreme weight loss-in 2013, doctors at first suspected an autoimmune disease, or even cancer, and eventually diagnosed her with late-stage Lyme disease. Twelve years later-eight years after her first auditory hallucination-she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. Wang would know: as a teen in the Bay Area, in 2001, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. “To be alive and sick is a far more complex endeavor than we like to admit,” Esmé Weijun Wang wrote in an essay for Catapult, in 2016. In her new essay collection, Esmé Weijun Wang elucidates the experience of having a mind that is both her proudest asset and her biggest liability.
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