Reviews with content warning for Self harm - The Collected Schizophrenias

the author has a very impersonal style of writing, alluding to her background in academia (which she likes to make note of, often) that makes it difficult to emotionally engaged with though highly informative. her first-hand account of schizophrenia and the way it is treated by the healthcare system was thought provoking and again, informative.

what i will say is that it jumps around from topic to topic with little coherency. the ultimate endpoint of the book, is more akin to a memoir, perhaps a journal, than essays. and because of this failure of the marketed and titled premise it begins to feel increasingly trite as it goes on. i think this quality would’ve likely stayed even if reworked into a memoir format, but it might have been somewhat mitigated. in a memoir if you don’t want to have deep reflection on your privileged life and attitude (she loves to remind readers that she went to yale, generally in every entry) that is one thing, but in a collection of essays? it seems odd and out of place how little this was explored or addressed, only simply, and i must stress, repeatedly, stated with no clear purpose.

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rowanbg's review

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emotional informative reflective fast-paced

4.75

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marywahlmeierbracciano's review

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challenging hopeful informative reflective slow-paced

5.0

I loved Esmé Weijun Wang’s book of essays, The Collected Schizophrenias. Well-researched yet compact, this book follows Wang’s mental health journey through misdiagnoses, forced hospitalizations, and hallucinations to eventually land upon a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. Each chapter follows a few different storylines, a nonlinear examination of Wang’s experiences paired with eloquent cultural commentary and sometimes a bit of data regurgitation to provide context. This book humanizes the schizophrenias in ways that society, and even mental health practitioners, have repeatedly denied. Also including the author’s experiences with delayed-onset PTSD and late stage Lyme disease (which is also bafflingly controversial in the medical community)—as well as her loving long-term relationship with her husband—The Collected Schizophrenias is an ultimately hopeful book which grants autonomy and power to those who know its namesake.

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courtneyfalling's review

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I had heard only good things about this collection so I was pretty excited for it, but from the beginning, I had a bad feeling. There's an uncomfortable combination of internalized ableism and isolation/alienation from larger disability community and politics, where I felt very on edge as a reader who identifies as disabled and Mad.

The first big, definable red flag was an essay that makes excuses for why a mother and sister brutally killed their schizophrenic son/brother, with an emphasis on their fatigue and not the inherent worth of their son/brother even if he never "recovered," and with no larger history or analysis of disability-related filicide (which, check out this link to Disability Day of Mourning information if you've never heard of this before, CW for death, grief, and ableism: https://disability-memorial.org/).

But I finally decided to DNF after "The Choice of Children," which features a heavy and uninspected emphasis on functional labels (which have so many issues), unnecessary and repeated use of the R slur, and an uncomfortable argument on why she doesn't want to have children to potentially pass genetic disability onto (which, it feels like eugenics should be discussed here, somehow? Like the history and current landscape of eugenics absolutely affects why some disabled people, especially those alienated from community and politics, don't want to birth potentially disabled children. And that doesn't automatically mean you should have children, that there aren't also valid reasons to not want to birth or raise children, but like... you cannot discuss this phenomenon independently of eugenics and if you're acting like you are it's probably just uncritically replicating neoeugenic logic).

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