Structure

The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of 13 essays centered around the author's experience with schizoaffective disorder, and also PTSD and Lyme disease. The essays are not entirely linear, in the sense that they bounce back and forth in time, covering the years since her initial diagnosis with bipolar disorder the summer before she began her freshman year at Yale. Generally, each essay encompasses a main idea or theme, and the author explains her own personal relationship to that theme, and in most cases, looks at how it is relevant to the wider world, and/or other people suffering from serious mental health conditions.

“Diagnosis” is an effective entry point into the collection because it outlines Wang's diagnosis, schizoaffective disorder, with the precise language used in the DSM-5, while also exploring Wang's personal feelings about that diagnosis and its medical and social implications. From there, Wang allows her...