The Collected Schizophrenias

“SCHIZOPHRENIA TERRIFIES. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy,” Esmé Weijun Wang writes at the outset of her incisive and moving debut collection of essays, and winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, The Collected Schizophrenias. “Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense.” Crazy, lunatic, terrifying, chaotic, dangerous: Wang is keenly aware of the specific host of terms frequently attached to schizophrenia, but also of the ways in which, conversely, the designation can frequently be invoked to mean all manner of things. In “Diagnosis,” the collection's first and longest essay, Wang cites a 2013 Slate article titled “Schizophrenic Is the New Retarded,” by the neuroscientist Patrick House, who noted that “a stock market can be schizophrenic when volatile, a politician when breaking from party lines, a composer when dissonant, a tax code when contradictory, weather when inclement, or a rapper when headlining as a poet.” While Wang acknowledges that some of the confusion is likely due to literal, etymological readings of the word, coined by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908 — from the Greek schizo, split, + phrene, mind — the cumulative effect is detrimental nonetheless. “In other words,” she summarizes, “schizophrenia is confusing, off-putting, nonsensical, unpredictable, inexplicable and just plain bad.”