We hope for ways to corral and control bad fortune, illness, unhappiness, discomfort, and death - all inevitable outcomes that we pretend are anything but. “uman catastrophes can bear the weight of human narrative - war, kidnapping, death - but schizophrenia’s built-in chaos resists sense.” She explains rather beautifully: “Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure we divide the interminable days into years, months, and weeks. “People speak of schizophrenics as if they were dead without being dead, gone in the eyes of those around them,” Wang continues. The disease - the word - conjures up constellations of pop culture archetypes of paranoid violence, the babbling shadow-lives of disabled homeless and the unknowable walking dead of sci-fi TV. “Schizophrenia terrifies.” That first sentence of Esmé Weijun Wang’s unnervingly excellent essay collection, “The Collected Schizophrenias,” bluntly and perfectly explains that reaction.
That afternoon, when I first became associated with the word - the idea, the cultural trope, the disease - remains, for many complicated reasons, the most frightening moment of my life. It felt like I had crossed some alien border I was no longer human.
My symptoms were demonstrably debilitating, and, still, it seemed to me, as if by some malicious magic, the assignment of the diagnosis, the mere mention of the word made everything incalculably worse. In retrospect, I understand I was scared to hear it. My doctor half-stuttered, “I think you have schizophrenia,” as if he was afraid to utter the word. I’d been hearing a chorus of voices, some of them frightening, and I’d been seeing things, but the several medications, the anti-psychotics and mood stabilizers, were not working. Despite the fact that I had no previous history with mental illness, I’d been in the brutal throes of psychosis and post-psychosis for seven long months. While sitting in my psychiatrist’s office, in the latter half of October 2016, mid-afternoon, amid the glassy glare of sunny Los Angeles, I was shakily, mistakenly, but not surprisingly diagnosed with schizophrenia.
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