The Collected Schizophrenias

In her essay collection, Wang demonstrates the failures of institutions in treating and preventing mental illness. She uses a mixture of ethos, logos, and pathos, including statistical data, personal experiences, comparisons between effective and ineffective organizations and institutions, and blunt honesty to assert her credibility. Wang explores problems that exist within all sorts of organizations and institutions, beginning with a short exposé into the failures of NAMI and the successes of Plumadore’s SOLVE. NAMI is an organization founded by families of people with mental illnesses and places most of its focus on said families. It has a strong tendency to paint people with mental disorders as burdens that their families must learn to cope with, and it has been accused of spreading misinformation in its reporting. When Wang spoke to a NAMI member, she found that the woman was entirely focused on her own suffering. Fortunately, organizations like SOLVE aim to reduce stigma and directly improve the quality of life for people with mental illnesses.

In Wang’s chronicles, the most severe cases of institutional failure are her accounts of her experiences in psychiatric hospitals. While attending Yale University, Wang started to experience psychosis and was involuntarily hospitalized. She was involuntarily hospitalized three times during the height of her illness, and each time was traumatizing for her. She describes it as living in a cage, being treated as subhuman, and being seen as someone who cannot be trusted: “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” (99). Wang recalls being strapped down at one point and asserts that she experienced no benefits from her time in the hospital.

Wang is not alone in her experience and was even warned before seeking help from Yale regarding her mental health that Yale tended to hospitalize students against their will. Because university and college students are among the most vulnerable to mental illness, particularly depression and anxiety, these students deserve to have this issue acknowledged and addressed by these institutions. However, “according to many who live and work at them, colleges and universities can’t realistically be expected to give students with severe mental illness the treatment they need” (74). While conditions are generally improving for people with mental illnesses, The Collected Schizophrenias highlights shortcomings in the system and the ways institutions fail their patients.

Each essay in The Collected Schizophrenias serves as a puzzle piece; once completed, the puzzle illustrates how schizoaffective disorder shaped the person Wang became and how it exists as part of her identity. Several times during her life, Wang has been told that she is not her disorder; she refers to person-first language and current psychology discourse that revolves around thinking of the person aside from their disorder and as someone who just happens to be affected. Wang is unsure about this concept, despite its good intentions, as she wonders what it means to have an identity apart from something that is so ingrained in who she is: “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” (70).

Wang demonstrates that many different factors led to her being formed by her disorder. It began with her diagnosis, when her entire worldview shifted and she had to adjust her perception of herself, her future, and who she would become. Wang grappled with the idea of not having children, concerns over whether she would only worsen and never return to her former self, and worries that she would push away the ones she loved. Although Wang experienced several periods of feeling limited by her disorder and was, at times, completely immobilized by it, she never let it hold her back in the long term. Instead, her disorder forced her to become strong, learn how to believe in herself, and rely on hope to get herself through dark times.

Since many of Wang’s life experiences have related directly to her mental disorder, it has shaped her in both direct and indirect ways. Wang has met all sorts of people she otherwise would not have, including doctors, mediums, friends, researchers, and writers. Wang also used her experience with schizoaffective disorder to write this collection of essays designed to educate, illuminate, and relate to the world. Many of Wang’s interests link to her disorder as well, such as her admiration of Francesca Woodman and self-portraits, her taste in movies and books, and her interest in the occult. Wang would not be who she is without schizoaffective disorder, and at no point in her collection does she express a desire not to have it. Instead, she writes, “However my life unfolds, goes my thinking, is how I am meant to live it; however my life unspools itself, I was created to bear it” (179).