It took eight years after she first began having hallucinations for Esmé Weijun Wang to receive her diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder. Her diagnosis, while laden with its own orbit of stigma and baggage, is a source of comfort. “I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable condition,” she writes in the first essay of her new book, The Collected Schizophrenias.
I think of TCS as having an audience among whoever is interested in reading it, really—people with mental health diagnoses, people who love people with such diagnoses, clinicians, researchers—anyone who’s curious about the topic. Within TCS I tried to describe, with visceral specificity, what psychosis is like, and what pre-psychosis is like. That kind of challenge is one of my primary motivations for writing in the first place; before I ever thought I’d write nonfiction, I wrote The Border of Paradise, my debut novel, which also deals with visceral descriptions of mental illness, in part because I wasn’t seeing those kinds of descriptions in other books.
Do you think that the “person living with [illness]” language you describe at the beginning “Perdition Days” is destigmatizing, or does it give people less room to describe their experiences with mental illness as being fundamentally a part of them?
Fri 5/17, 7 PM, Women & Children First, 5233 N. Clark, Free
