The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays

by Esmé Weijun Wang

A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure. A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way: one that has been experienced and recorded not just in modern times, but also by the ancient Egyptians, who described a condition similar to schizophrenia in the Book of Hearts, and attributed psychosis to the dangerous influence of poison in the heart and uterus.

After all, it is easy to forget that psychiatric diagnoses are human constructs, and not handed down from an all-knowing God on stone tablets; to “have schizophrenia” is to fit an assemblage of symptoms, which are listed in a purple book made by humans.

The psychiatric hierarchy decrees who can and cannot be high-functioning and “gifted.”

With such unpleasant associations tied to the schizophrenias, it is no wonder that I cling to the concept of being high-functioning. As in most marginalized groups, there are those who are considered more socially appropriate than others, and who therefore distance themselves from those so-called inappropriate people, in part because being perceived as incapable of success causes a desire to distance oneself from other, similarly marginalized people who are thought to be even less capable of success.

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.

If the conversation winds its way to my diagnosis, I emphasize my normalcy. See my ordinary, even superlative appearance! Witness the fact that I am articulate. Rewind our interaction and see if you can spot cracks in the facade. See if you can, in sifting through your memory, find hints of insanity to make sense of what I’ve said about who I am. After all, what kind of lunatic has a fashionable pixie cut, wears red lipstick, dresses in pencil skirts and tucked-in silk blouses? What sort of psychotic wears Loeffler Randall heels without tottering?

“I went to Yale” is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless.

My thoughts leaped to suicide—my entire life had been marked by illness and depression, and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t continue in the same way. I was convinced that I would be depressed forever, though the previous week alone had proved this belief to be erroneous.

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.

There might be something comforting about the notion that there is, deep down, an impeccable self without disorder, and that if I try hard enough, I can reach that unblemished self. But there may be no impeccable self to reach, and if I continue to struggle toward one, I might go mad in the pursuit.

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.

There are two issues here: one being the act of passing on a genetic burden, and the other being my ability, as a woman living with severe mental illness, to be a good mother.

As Bly’s anecdotes, and my own, indicate, a primary feature of the experience of staying in a psychiatric hospital is that you will not be believed about anything. A corollary to this feature: things will be believed about you that are not at all true.

Though nearly all the statements a psychiatric patient can make are not believed, proclamations of insanity are the exception to the rule.

A fictional narrative is considered nuanced when it includes contradictions, but a narrative of trauma is ill-advised to do the same.

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.

Pacing, they told me at graduate school, is one of the beginning writer’s biggest challenges, because a beginning writer wants to tell all the wrong things, or everything at once.

According to Greek myth, Demeter calls forth Persephone from the land of the dead once a year. I imagine myself as that pale daughter, who, in my imagination, has become so accustomed to being among the dead that she doesn’t comprehend her transition into the land of the living.

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.

“Let’s go and look around. We can see how we feel,” she said, which was a common refrain during that trip, and is a common attitude among the chronically ill.

I am someone who finds comfort in science and authority. After all, I used to work in a research laboratory, and while working at a fashion and culture magazine, I was derisively called “conservative” by the editor in chief during a botched pitch session. But to be so ill that I couldn’t hold down a full-time job, and to simultaneously be without a diagnosis, treatment, or hope, made me receptive to the decree of chronic Lyme when my IGeneX test came back positive. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Exploring the possibilities of the sacred arts brought up the question of medication. Even as I considered that I might be thin-skinned, and therefore privy to otherworldly experiences, at no point was I inclined to quit talk therapy or my regimen of psychopharmacological drugs. 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.

The line between insanity and mysticism is thin; the line between reality and unreality is thin. Liminality as a spiritual concept is all about the porousness of boundaries.

The nonrational psychotics, Bri tells me, have intact reasoning, “but it’s coming, or it’s partially informed, I would say is usually the case, from a different source than what we’re used to. There’s an internal logic, and often their insights are dead-on if you can peel back the code that those insights are often delivered in, and start to understand how that internal logic works.”

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.

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.