The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

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. In the Atlantic article “When the Body Attacks the Mind,” journalist Moises Velasquez-Manoff, author of An Epidemic of Absence: A New Way of Understanding Allergies and Autoimmune Diseases, describes the nightmare experienced by the Egger family when thirteen-year-old Sasha suddenly began to exhibit severe psychotic symptoms. One specialist diagnosed Sasha as having bipolar disorder, subsequently prescribing antipsychotics; Sasha’s mother, who was a pediatric psychiatrist and understood the unlikelihood of a sudden onset of mental illness, persisted until she found a neurologist who suspected something else: an autoimmune variant of encephalitis. Upon infusion with antibodies used to treat autoimmune attacks, Sasha “improved almost immediately.” “If an autoimmune disorder of the brain could so closely resemble psychiatric illnesses,” Velasquez-Manoff asks, “then what, really, were these illnesses?”