Review: The Collected Schizophrenias by Esme Weijun Wang

The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of 13 essays largely about the author's experience with Schizoaffective disorder. Before this book, my main exposure to Schizoaffective disorder comes from Lauren from the youtube channel Living Well with Schizophrenia; I really appreciated broadening my information sources, especially because I think there are a few things on which Lauren and Esme would not agree!

I will start off by saying that if you are like me and don't believe in any sort of magic and think that many alternative medicine practices are exploitive, you will probably like the first 11 chapters and be slightly confused by the last two. That's fine, it is a memoir, and we are bound to disagree with some thoughts others have. But I will talk about my thoughts on the last two chapters later.

Overall I really enjoyed Wang's writing style; she is clear and sharp and has clearly mastered relaying her experiences to others in a deft and engaging manner. She dives deep into both her own life experiences and a very understandable scientific and historical understanding of schizophrenia and its adjacent diseases.

I was particularly invested in the parts of the book that explored the ways in which mental health care infrastructure fails those; it is presumably there to be helping. Wang presents opposing views on lots of mental healthcare topics and uses her own experiences to show how some of the current infrastructure either helped or hurt her personally.

I also really enjoyed reading about her own musings on the way in which she related to those who share her diagnosis and those who don't and how that has changed over her life. I tend to really like narratives that explore your own relationship to communities you are a part of, and Wang does a fascinating job of doing this.

Something that did not sit well with me was the way in which Wang wrote about Late Stage Lyme Disease. She does mention that the disease is controversial, though I do not think she does anywhere near as thorough a job explaining this as she does other topics in her book. Wang does not hold the same beliefs about Late Stage Lyme as the majority of the scientific community does, which is fine science is always evolving and can be wrong, but I do not think she delves at all into why it is controversial. And she completely does not mention that the lab that gave her this diagnosis is VERY controversial, it borders on having the reputation of diagnosing anyone who will pay with Lyme if they want. I am also using the word controversial because that is what she says, but I am not sure that it is controversial? I 100% believe that Wang is ill and should be taken seriously in that illness.

I also want to note that the ostracization of people who are given diagnoses that fall outside of science is probably not very smart of the medical community. If people feel they cannot trust you, then you cannot help them or collect data that could allow you to learn. But I still don't think Wang was quite as comprehensive in the exploration of this topic as she was with the rest of the book. I also didn't love the way she talked about medicine and alternative treatments; she does not at all delve into any way in which alternative treatments can be harmful. Obviously, this is her book, and she does not have to do that, but it was something that I personally did not like. I just would have liked at least a nod to the fact that just because she is open to both paths does not mean that there isn't harm in alternative treatments because they do often encourage people not to seek medical intervention.

I also did not love the final essay. I kind of rolled my eyes at the idea that I’m supposed to believe that you have supernatural powers based on testing yourself for supernatural powers is frankly wild. And there is nothing wrong inherently with believing that tying a talisman cord around you helps you not experience symptoms you don't want (that you are maybe tying to the supernatural and maybe tying to schizoaffective disorder). Still, I would have liked a mention that it could work for her because it is a grounding technique and not inherently because it is supernatural. But I am a person who very much does not embrace any sort of magical thinking. I think magic of any sort if it were real, would be very obvious.

I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about mental illness, the healthcare infrastructure surrounding mental illness, the impact it has on patients, and to those who just love well-written memoir!