The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense;

I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable experience.

also having concerns with whether i had a face, but not wanting to look to see if i had a face and feeling agitated at the prospect of other faces.

Btw, have you read Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold?

The diagnosis will affect how they are seen by the medical community, the legal system, the Transportation Security Administration, and so on.

It was frustrating to see interviewees come in and reveal an underbelly of bloody wounds, only to have to turn them away from participating in the experiments for which they’d applied, and often for what seemed like insignificant reasons. An Eeyore-esque man who wept at random and clearly seemed depressed could be eliminated from our “major depressive disorder” (MDD) subject pool for not meeting the full criteria.

Clinical flexibility has its benefits. It also has the potential for human error, as well as the ability to harm.

One potential explanation suggests that the evolutionary development of speech, language, and creativity, while bestowing significant gifts, has “dragged” along less desirable genetic tendencies with it; from this perspective, schizophrenia is simply the price humanity pays for the ability to write heartrending operas and earthshaking speeches. Another argument: schizophrenics are, evolutionarily, meant to be ad hoc “cult leaders” whose bizarre ideas split off chunks of the human population.

I worry that seeing schizophrenia as a gateway to artistic brilliance glamorizes the disorder in unhealthy ways, therefore preventing suffering schizophrenics from seeking help. If creativity is more important than being able to maintain a sense of reality, I could make a plausible argument for remaining psychotic, but the price of doing so is one that neither I nor my loved ones are likely to choose to pay.

He’s better now, he tells me, because he was finally told that he himself knows better than anyone else what he needs.

Because he could discern a method of recovery for himself, he believes that the issue of personal, bodily autonomy must take precedence. Plumadore says those with mental illness almost universally experience the effects of trauma when forced into treatment, and disagrees with “hurting someone in order to help them.”

Depression is often compared to diabetes—in other words, it’s not your fault if you get it, and you’ll be fine if you just take care of it. Schizophrenia, on the other hand, is compared to Alzheimer’s—it’s still not your fault if you get it, but there’s no fixing it, and though you may not intend to be a burden, you’ll still be one until you die.

Yet I recognize the ability to make a choice: to reject an image or perception of what my experience of schizophrenia looks like.

But that line distressed me: for Lawson, my psychiatric condition, and the medications I take for it, put me on par with a fairy-killer; but if I were taking Haldol as a “side dish” for depression, I’d remain on the proper side of the mentally unwell.

Our society demands what Chinese poet Chuang Tzu (370–287 BCE) describes in his poem “Active Life”: Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair.

clients are encouraged to help guide their own treatment—thus contributing to higher rates of compliance and a greater sense of autonomy.

As Dr. Lisa Dixon, director of OnTrackNY, told the New York Times, “We wanted to reinvent treatment so that it was something people actually want.”

Weaponized glamour,” the latter being a reference to Chaédria LaBouvier’s work on the concept of “using beauty and style in direct, political ways that subvert dehumanizing expectations.”

What happens if I see my disordered mind as a fundamental part of who I am? It has, in fact, shaped the way I experience life. Should the question be a matter of percentages of my lifetime, I’ve spent enough of this lifetime with schizoaffective disorder to see it as a dominant force.

Mark, however, was far more high-functioning than Stuart, who seemed unable to carry on a conversation unless it involved shouting science facts or reciting, in savant-like detail, the plots of the Harry Potter movies.

I was surprised by my love for Stuart. He was smart and hilarious, and knew a lot of fascinating trivia. He and I also shared a diagnosis, and perhaps that, most of all, is why I had patience for his tantrums and oddities.

And yet I suspect that what’s truly scary about the word has more to do with the inefficacy of psychiatric treatment from that era, which did little to rein in its patients’ most disturbing behaviors, including those that were inexplicable, dangerous, or violent.

Though nearly all the statements a psychiatric patient can make are not believed, proclamations of insanity are the exception to the rule. “I want to kill myself” generally holds water,

If not for Rosenhan’s credibility as a scientist and the ensuing publication of his 1973 paper “On Being Sane in Insane Places,” those diagnoses could have dogged Rosenhan and his compatriots for life. Unlike me, Rosenhan ultimately proved to the doctors he had duped that he was, really and truly, a Stanford researcher.

Nellie Bly, whose asylum exposé instigated an $850,000 increase in the budget of the New York City Department of Public Charities and Correction.

The obsession with discharge is most prominent among those who are involuntarily hospitalized, as I have been, because those who’ve checked themselves in are permitted to leave at any time.

Forgiveness, as it turns out, is not a linear prospect. Neither is healing. Both flare up and die down; so do my symptoms of schizoaffective disorder.

When the self has been swallowed by illness, isn’t it cruel to insist on a self that is not illness?

Rebecca Solnit says in The Faraway Nearby, “There is a serenity in illness that takes away all the need to do and makes just being enough,” which has not been my experience. After all, prolonged and chronic illness stitches itself into life in a different way than acute illness does. With chronic illness, life persists astride illness unless the illness spikes to acuity; at that point, surviving from one second to the next is the greatest ambition I can attempt. The absolution from doing more and dreaming big that I experience during surgeries and hospitalization is absent during chronic illness.

A cornerstone belief of ILADS and the chronic Lyme community is that the ELISA (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) screening test, which the CDC mandates as a necessary component of a true Lyme diagnosis, is unreliable and misses 35 percent of culture-proven Lyme disease.

Lyme is “the great imitator,” and is therefore often misdiagnosed as illnesses ranging from chronic fatigue syndrome (also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis) to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Sick people, as it turns out, generally stray into alternative medicine not because they relish the idea of indulging in what others call quackery, but because traditional Western medicine has failed them.

But regardless of whether Morgellons is “real” or whether it originates from bacteria as Lyme disease does, I can no longer put myself at a comfortable distance from “those people” who self-diagnose with Morgellons. We are, in the end, linked by desperation based in suffering, and based on a system of conventional medicine that not only has no method of alleviating that suffering, but also accuses us of psychosomatic pathology.

Catholicism appealed to me, and still does. The aesthetics of Catholicism, which are rooted in mysticism and ritual, and which often include Latin and incense and pillar candles, thrummed a chord within my heart. I respected the intellectualism of the Jesuit tradition.

Illness draws me to places such as this. The prior winter, while visiting my in-laws in New Orleans, I had gone to St. Roch Chapel, which was built after Reverend Peter Thevis prayed to Saint Roch for his parishioners to be spared from yellow fever.

St. Roch Chapel has since become a place where those hoping for miraculous cures not only pray for intercession, but also leave behind symbols of their ailments as offerings once they’ve been cured.

The belief that DSM-caliber mental illness might be linked to bodily illness, and particularly to autoimmune illness, as my neurologist proposed, is gaining traction.

“If an autoimmune disorder of the brain could so closely resemble psychiatric illnesses,” Velasquez-Manoff asks, “then what, really, were these illnesses?”

According to the growing field of autoimmune neurology, the immune system can wage a misguided attack on a person’s central or peripheral nervous system.

I saw El Santuario as being built on hope, which is not the same thing as faith. Hope is a cast line in search of fish; faith is the belief that you won’t starve to death, or that if you do, God’s plan could account for the tragedy.

Amy whispered that El Santuario emphasizes suffering and death as opposed to the resurrection, and it is true—a macabre Christ on the cross is marked with gaping wounds, and the Stations of the Cross are dark with violence in their depictions of Christ condemned. “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered,” reads Hebrews 5:8. Believers, too, suffer, as 2 Corinthians 1:5 tells us that “for just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.” I never did become a Catholic, but in my illness I became hungry to understand suffering; if I could understand it, I could perhaps suffer less, and even find comfort in the understanding.

What I have found difficult is not seeking an escape hatch out of pain, whether that be pills, alcohol, or the dogged pursuit of a cure. In suffering, I am always looking for a way out.

The test results all came back negative. People congratulated me on this news, but I sought comfort in those who understood that negative test results meant no answers—meant Dr. J’s diminished interest in my case and thus in my suffering—meant that I had no avenue of treatment to pursue and no kind of cure in my sight line.

All I can do now is wait for spontaneous remission.

I experience mild psychosis here and there, but do not consider it possible to ever be completely free of the schizophrenias. They have been with me for too long, I think, to be obliterated, unlike these more recent ailments, which feel like part of the wrong narrative, and make me wonder how many different types of sick girl I can be.

Over the next decade, I would occasionally consider the utility of seeing psychosis as an ability: I could improve my mental health by thinking of schizoaffective disorder as a tool to access something useful, as opposed to a terrifying pathology. As Viktor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning, we want our suffering, if it must be endured, to mean something. Yet I had no idea what this belief would look like in practice.

She aligns her beliefs with the Picasso quote “Everything you can imagine is real.”

In seeking her out, I was intrigued by the idea of finding a way to make sense of my idiosyncrasies and anxieties. When I mentioned this to Bri, she laughed and said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but belief does not simplify life.”

Perhaps this seems contradictory, or indicative of skepticism, but I knew that I’d suffered greatly during psychosis and was not interested in turning face-first, again, into the storm of bleak and blustering insanity. By learning about the liminal, I was not trying to prolong my psychotic experiences, but attempting to make sense of them. I wanted to create a container for what had happened to me and shove the nastiness in.

i love the clarification on one’s own terms - telling not showing

Working with the liminal involves working with faith. One article of faith is This suffering will be of use to you someday.