The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

Psychiatry also operates by treating symptoms and not a root cause, and so my psychopharmacological treatment was not impacted by the dramatic change in my chart.

An exception is outsider artist Henry Darger, whose influential 15,145-page work In the Realms of the Unreal is both brilliant and the work of an obsessive, troubled mind that may or may not have been afflicted with schizophrenia—either way, Darger’s inability to function in “normal” life is inextricable from his art.

Among psychiatric researchers, having a job is considered one of the major characteristics of being a high-functioning person. Most recently, Saks has spearheaded one of the largest extant studies about the nature of high-functioning schizophrenia. In it, employment remains the primary marker of someone who is high-functioning, as having a job is the most reliable sign that you can pass in the world as normal. Most critically, a capitalist society values productivity in its citizens above all else, and those with severe mental illness are much less likely to be productive in ways considered valuable: by adding to the cycle of production and profit.

Produce! Get results! Make money! Make friends! Make changes! Or you will die of despair.

Because I am capable of achievement, I find myself uncomfortable around those who are visibly psychotic and audibly disorganized. I’m uncomfortable because I don’t want to be lumped in with the screaming man on the bus, or the woman who claims that she’s the reincarnation of God. I’m uncomfortably uncomfortable because I know that these are my people in ways that those who have never experienced psychosis can’t understand, and to shun them is to shun a large part of myself. In my mind, there is a line between me and those like Jane and Laura; to others, that line is thin, or so negligible as not to be a line at all.

I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,”

For one season, I saw shadowy demons darting at me from all angles, and I couldn’t control my response, which was to jump to the side or duck or startle at things that no one else could see. If I was with someone, I’d pretend afterward that nothing had happened, and usually my companion or companions who knew of my diagnosis would generously pretend that I hadn’t just ducked, rather dramatically, for no reason. But I was mortified. It didn’t matter how pulled-together I seemed when I was dodging specters that no one else could see. I knew that I looked crazy, and that no amount of snappy dressing could conceal the dodging. Because such movements were a necessary concession to my craziness, I responded by trying even harder to seem normal when I wasn’t being assailed by hallucinations. I went dancing. I drank Jameson on the rocks and ate potato skins in Irish bars and pizza joints. I did all the normal things I could think of.

During my first semester at Yale, my mother swelled and grew monstrous in my mind; she loomed as someone whose emotional lability had imprinted me with what I frankly called an inability to deal with day-to-day life.

Yale is mocked for its determination to be elite from the get-go—for fashioning itself in the likeness of Oxford and Cambridge, and then having acid dumped on itself to simulate age. Yale is, in the world of elite universities, a prepubescent girl swiping on mascara before the first day of middle school. Yale’s campus is still the most beautiful campus I know.

“Never tell them you’ve thought about killing yourself,” they counseled me. I was a freshman. They were taking me under their wing, offering me wisdom. “Never tell them you’re thinking about killing yourself, okay?” I think about that advice now: never tell your doctor that you’re considering killing yourself. Yet this was sound advice, in the end, if I wanted to stay.

I’m still trying to figure out what “okay” is, particularly whether there exists a normal version of myself beneath the disorder, in the way a person with cancer is a healthy person first and foremost. In the language of cancer, people describe a thing that “invades” them so that they can then “battle” the cancer. No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold. In my peer education courses I was taught to say that I am a person with schizoaffective disorder. “Person-first language” suggests that there is a person in there somewhere without the delusions and the rambling and the catatonia.

But what if there isn’t? 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. And if it’s true that I think, therefore I am, perhaps the fact that my thoughts have been so heavily mottled with confusion means that those confused thoughts make up the gestalt of my self; this is why I use the word “schizophrenic,” although many mental health advocates don’t.

My friends with anxiety disorders, for example, tend to speak of anxiety as a component of their personalities. Laura Turner writes, in her essay “How Do You Inherit Anxiety?,” “It is from Verna Lee Boatright Berg that I inherited my long face, my quick hands, my fear that someday soon I will do something wrong and the world will come to a sharp end.” In their minds, there is no tabula rasa overlaid by a transparency of hypochondria, generalized anxiety disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder; such thoughts are hardwired into their minds, with no self that can be untangled from the pathology they experience. Another friend’s obsessive-compulsive disorder has calmed significantly since she began taking Prozac, but she continues to be most comfortable when things are tidy, even though her tidiness is no longer disruptive. She still washes her hands more thoroughly than anyone I know. There might be something comforting about the notion that...

deception. I used to eat sweets, and after I decided to cut back on sugar for dietary reasons, I learned to say, in lieu of a more thorough explanation, “I don’t like dessert.”

I read in the New York Times that a child of a parent who has bipolar disorder is thirteen times more likely to develop the disorder than a child of a parent who does not. A piece on Salon about madness and motherhood, written by a woman with bipolar disorder, evoked the following reader responses: “I grew up with a bipolar mother, and it made my childhood nightmarish”; “I know I’m supposed to say I’m glad I was born but [as a bipolar child of a bipolar mother, I] am not”; “Someone who is mentally unstable enough to require psychotropics should NOT, under any circumstances, even consider having a child.” I read all sixty-eight comments. These I remember.

The hospital maintained for the remainder of my stay that I had come in feeling “unsafe,” with delusions of persecution. Because “unsafe” doubled as “suicidal,” I was considered a danger to myself. Even though I had voluntarily walked into the ER for help, “unsafe” meant that I was considered to be “involuntarily hospitalized,” which also meant that I was locked down in the rural Louisiana hospital, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, until the doctor gave me permission to leave. I did not know how long that would be.

Movies, to differing degrees, are made to enforce the stories they tell, and we applaud when such power is wielded efficiently. An Oscar-winning drama makes us cry, and earns our admiration, because we believe to some degree in the story on-screen; we make a pact with the film to suspend disbelief. If the story is absorbing and the director skilled, we allow ourselves to agree that the actor truly is abandoning his soulmate in a cave, and, accordingly, we ache if that actor is deft enough in his craft to make us believe his pain. His grief becomes, in a way, our grief—our pain at arm’s length, but still close enough to make us wince. Even tearjerkers can be considered efficient, if only because their melodrama cuts straight to our softest places, and gives us the pleasure of plugging in to our own capacity for empathy, no matter how corny.

These days, I hesitate to say much about what exactly happened between John Doe and me. I have been told by people that I’ve made a fuss about nothing, thus compounding the trauma of hurt with the trauma of feeling like a crybaby. I don’t chronicle the rape, because to do so feels like testifying before the reader, who is judge and jury, and I have had enough nightmares about inept and poorly received testimony to try. No one has to believe me when I say that it was bad, but I refuse to give the public that kind of ammunition in the first place. I keep it to myself now: the shine of the streetlight, the look in his eyes.

My form of schizoaffective disorder was, Dr. M said, medication-resistant. Both agreed that the best course of action was for me to learn coping mechanisms and practice acceptance.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT)—also known as “therapy with homework”—operates on a systematized process of adjusting false cognitions and maladaptive behaviors.

me. I spent much of my time in catatonic psychosis, a form of agitation characterized by overactive movement or no movement at all, and I lay in my bed feeling psychic agony more excruciating than any personal experience of physical pain.

During the “perdition days,” which had no rhythm to them, I could not summon the motivation to do anything. I would not eat. I often would not move. I would not attempt to read or answer an email or have a conversation, because there is no point in doing anything when in perdition. Instead, there is only horror, and an agitation that refuses to manifest physically for lack of motivation.

There was the question of what to wear to my electroconvulsive therapy consult, which would take place at the University of California, San Francisco. If I looked too pulled-together for the consult, I figured, I wouldn’t be able to convey that most of the time I was suffering from psychic torture. If I looked like a mess, I might end up institutionalized, and I’d had enough experience with psychiatric hospitals to know that I didn’t want or need hospitalization.

Oh God. I can’t believe that James Taylor is still alive, and I’m dead.

“The painter constructs, the photographer discloses,” says Susan Sontag in On Photography.

In exercises designed to discern my primary values, recognition, to my dismay, appears again and again. I care about recognition as much as I care about my own self-regard, in large part because I don’t trust my self-evaluation.

(“We mistake just feelings as feelings for love,” a friend once told me.)

One is more easily prepared with an always-ready model, and what subject is more available for exploration than the self? What better stuff to make art of if one is an ambitious artist, which Woodman undoubtedly was? Why not, as a writer, create essays in which I myself appear?

Francesca, what do you think of these photographs? Do you see what I was trying to do? I was trying to make myself more real.

Hung on my bedroom wall is a quote attributed to Joan of Arc: “I am not afraid. I was born to do this.” However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life un-spools itself, I was created to bear it.

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.

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.

I originally went to Bri because psychosis had made me fear my own mind. Since then, the sacred arts have given me some solace not so much through the beliefs they provide as through the actions they recommend. To say this prayer—burn this candle—perform this ritual—create this salt or honey jar—is to have something to do when it seems that nothing can be done.

When a certain kind of psychic detachment occurs, I retrieve my ribbon; I tie it around my ankle. I tell myself that should delusion come to call, or hallucinations crowd my senses again, I might be able to wrangle sense out of the senseless. I tell myself that if I must live with a slippery mind, I want to know how to tether it too.