The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

In her article, Baker makes the case that psychiatric illness is punished by colleges and universities that instead ought to be accommodating students under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Rather than receiving help, mentally ill students are frequently, as I was, pressured into leaving—or ordered to leave—by the schools that once welcomed them. The underlying expectation is that a student must be mentally healthy to return to school, which is difficult and unlikely to happen to the degree the administration would like. This is saying, essentially, that students should not have severe mental illness.

It is impressive, and horrifying, how many authors choose to employ the trope of discovering a woman’s body in pieces, scattered, or in garbage bags, unrecognizable. I wondered if bookstores, instead of having sections for Mysteries or African American Literature, ought to cordon off a section for Girls in Trouble.

In a 2006 study by William W. Eaton et al., which links three existing Danish data sets, the researchers concluded that “a history of any autoimmune disease was associated with a 45% increase in risk for schizophrenia.”