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CanadianReader's Reviews > The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays
by
by
CanadianReader's review
bookshelves: mental-illness, essays, autobiography-and-memoir, 2020-books-read-in, nonfiction, psychiatry
Jan 11, 2020
bookshelves: mental-illness, essays, autobiography-and-memoir, 2020-books-read-in, nonfiction, psychiatry
Wang’s book is a collection of personal essays, most of which focus to some degree on the author’s experience of schizoaffective disorder. For me, the essays that deal with her psychosis and involuntary hospitalizations were the strongest. Wang is also interested in popular culture, particularly films, that relate to or shed light on her condition. While I was intrigued by her allusion to possible links between autoimmune malfunction and neurologic and psychiatric disease, her experience of chronic Lyme disease (a controversial diagnosis, to be sure), alternative “medical� treatments for that condition, divination (using Tarot cards), and “spiritual� pilgrimage and healing (quackery) were less engaging—even dull—matters to wade through.
All in all, this is a mixed bag. It’s an interesting book but hardly essential reading.
All in all, this is a mixed bag. It’s an interesting book but hardly essential reading.
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
January 11, 2020
– Shelved
January 11, 2020
–
Finished Reading
Yes, disorganized for sure. That’s the problem with the essay format: the writer passes over the same material several times, but the reader doesn’t get a good sense of chronology—and, specifically, of how the author’s disease progressed. Still, I learned quite a bit and I’d read Wang again. Also, I wasn’t bothered by her so-called “privilege�, and it seems a fair number of readers were. I understand why a person might want to focus on strengths and “high function� with such a diagnosis. It is no privilege to have a condition like that, and a person is lucky is she has the means to receive good care.