![]() The patients with schizophrenia landed at the bottom-excluded from group therapy, seen as lunatic and raving, and incapable of fitting into the requirements of normalcy. I was in this group, and was perhaps even ranked as highly as the depressives, because I came from Yale. In the middle of the hierarchy were those with anorexia and bipolar disorder. ![]() We had already proved ourselves capable of being high-functioning, and thus contained potential if only we could be steered onto the right track. A precocious young person on a track to success, Wang experiences a manic episode at Yale that leads to her first hospitalization. ![]() The Collected Schizophrenias is a book of personal essays that was the 2016 winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Because we were in the Yale Psychiatric Institute (now the Yale New Haven Psychiatric Hospital), many of those hospitalized were Yalies, and therefore considered bright people who’d simply wound up in bad situations. Esm Weijun Wang is a novelist who has been diagnosed with Schizoaffective Disorder. Wang mixes in news stories about schizophrenia sufferers who have committed or been the victims of. From here, each essay focusses on a different aspect of either her own life or those of others. Depressives, who constituted most of the ward’s population, sat at the top of the chain, even if they were receiving electroconvulsive therapy. The way the collection is structured was clearly and excellently thought-out: first educating us, then encouraging empathy and understanding. ![]() “A natural hierarchy arose in the hospital, guided by both our own sense of functionality and the level of functionality perceived by the doctors, nurses, and social workers who treated us. ![]()
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