The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

“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. My previously suspected diagnosis of anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis is one such example—the disorder occurs when the immune system attacks the brain’s NMDA receptors, resulting in a chaotic array of symptoms such as speech dysfunction, hallucinations, delusions, and cognitive and behavioral disturbances—symptoms, in other words, that look like schizophrenia. 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.”