Why Lory loves this book
Wang unflinchingly brings to our attention the suffering caused by a mental health system that is not about health care in any ongoing sense, but about categorizing people and neutralizing immediate threats. The indignity of losing her autonomy and being involuntarily committed three times, not one of which helped her. The frightening ease with which lies become truth when transmitted by social media, preying on susceptible minds. “For those of us living with severe mental illness, the world is full of cages where we can be locked in,” Wang writes. It’s hard, but necessary, to look at those cages and consider what we are doing to other human beings in order to keep ourselves safe.
Even as her mind has sometimes been her enemy, it’s also been Wang’s greatest strength, and she displays her intelligence, research skills, and artistic gifts to their full extent here. At the same time, she…
6 authors picked The Collected Schizophrenias as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
An intimate, moving book written with the immediacy and directness of one who still struggles with the effects of mental and chronic illness, The Collected Schizophrenias cuts right to the core. Schizophrenia is not a single unifying diagnosis, and Esme Weijun Wang writes not just to her fellow members of the "collected schizophrenias" but to those who wish to understand it as well. Opening with the journey toward her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, Wang discusses the medical community's own disagreement about labels and procedures for diagnosing those with mental illness, and then follows an arc that examines the manifestations of…