A review by rigbees
The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang

5.0

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

Esmé Weijun Wang's collection of essays on the schizophrenia family is brilliant and timely. As a series of essays, it provides a number of lenses for expressing different feelings and aspects of schizoaffective disorder and related diagnoses. Some of these essays are more personal; others are more distant. However, in each of them, Wang presents a nuanced, faceted look at living with a schizo- diagnosis. However, it is clear (and Wang doesn't flinch away!) from the fact that the reader is only really listening because she meets all the criteria of respectability: societally approved employment, excellent background, stable intimate partnerships

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

Part of this looks at Wang's personal pains and the experiences she's recounted. She presents them matter-of-factly and with an insistent voice. It's hard to look away from the suffering that she's experienced and the ways in which our social systems made it worse (or were entirely the cause of suffering!). When discussing the ways in which she was expelled from Yale, she presents the full confusion and impossible bind the university put her in.

As she discussed the “traumatic” nature of receiving a mental health diagnosis, I realized that she was doing so in the context of the family members surrounding the person with a mental illness, and not in the context of people being diagnosed with mental illness; in the Family-to-Family documentation, NAMI specifically states that the program is based on “a trauma model of family healing.”

Having followed the national conversation around mental health, it's clear that people with the "severe" diagnoses are often pushed out of the narrative. As Wang points out, it's often a question of what do with them, not how to support people in creating treatment plans that work for them. I think that this is the type of book that anyone who wants to engage with the national conversation should read, but it doesn't bullshit about what the effects on involuntary commitment are.