Few books on schizophrenia have made it into general bookstore window displays. The Collected Schizophrenias, published by Graywolf Press in 2019, did. The essays inside, written by Esmé Weijun Wang from her own life with schizoaffective disorder, won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and earned a wave of mainstream literary attention that books on serious mental illness rarely receive. The collection is now widely taught in MFA programmes, recommended by clinicians to patients and families, and is among the most cited contemporary works in conversations about how to write about psychosis without flattening it.
Wang is a literary essayist living with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, whose work treats psychosis as a complex set of experiences rather than a single condition or a redemption arc.
Who she is
Wang grew up in the United States, attended Yale and later transferred to Stanford, and trained as a fiction writer. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was published in 2016 and earned her a place on the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" list. She has spoken openly across her career about her diagnoses: schizoaffective disorder (bipolar type), late-stage Lyme disease, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among other co-occurring conditions. She is also the founder of The Unexpected Shape, a project supporting other writers with chronic illnesses.
Why the book is plural
The title's most important word is the one that surprises people: schizophrenias, plural. Wang opens the book by walking through the way diagnostic categories — schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, schizophreniform disorder, brief psychotic disorder — shift over time, overlap with each other, and behave differently in different bodies. The plural is a corrective. The "schizophrenias" of her title are not a single disease but a constellation of related conditions, each lived differently by each person who has them.
This framing maps reasonably well onto current clinical thinking. The DSM-5 collapsed older subtypes (paranoid, disorganised, catatonic) but explicitly recognises a spectrum of psychotic disorders that share features but differ in course, treatment response, and prognosis. See our explainers on schizoaffective disorder and schizophrenia versus schizoaffective for the clinical distinctions Wang plays with in her essays.
What the essays do
The book's essays cover a wide range:
- The week she spent at Yale's psychiatric unit and the slow process of being asked to leave the university
- A lucid account of Cotard's delusion — the conviction that one is dead — when it struck her in 2013
- The complicated experience of attending a workshop for people who claim to have been visited by aliens
- An essay on fashion and chronic illness — how she dresses to feel like a person on bad days
- The intersection of her psychiatric and neurological diagnoses, including the contested category of late-stage Lyme
- What "high-functioning" actually means and what it costs
The literary craft is the point. Wang refuses to write either inspiration porn or a misery memoir. She treats her own perception of reality as something to investigate honestly — including the parts where her perceptions, by clinical consensus, were wrong.
"High-functioning" as a problem
One of the book's most cited essays interrogates the phrase "high-functioning schizophrenic." Wang notes the praise that label receives — and the cost. To be high-functioning is to be expected to keep functioning, to be denied accommodations, to be doubted when symptoms intensify, and to be held up as proof that other people with the diagnosis "could do it too if they tried." She is careful to point out that the same diagnosis produces wildly different functional outcomes, shaped by class, race, family resources, severity of illness, and luck. The implicit moral hierarchy in "high-functioning" — the suggestion that some people with schizophrenia are doing it better than others — is one of the book's quiet targets.
Cotard's, faith, and the limits of insight
Wang is unusually candid about delusional experiences. The most striking example is her account of Cotard's delusion, a rare condition in which the person becomes convinced they are dead. She describes walking through her apartment certain her body was a kind of animated corpse, and the strange domestic logic of trying to live an ordinary life while believing this. The essay does not resolve into easy meaning. It is one of the clearest first-person accounts of a major psychotic experience in contemporary literature, in part because she does not retroactively pretend to have seen through it at the time.
What clinicians have taken from the book
Several training programmes now assign sections of The Collected Schizophrenias to medical students and psychology trainees. The book's value to clinicians is in part stylistic — Wang's prose models how a patient might describe inner experience if she had the time, language, and trust to do so. It is also clinical: her essays show the texture of partial insight, the social cost of carrying a diagnosis, and the way side effects shape decisions about whether to engage with treatment at all.
For more on what therapy can offer alongside medication, see our piece on CBT for psychosis.
The chronic illness frame
Wang has been clear in interviews that she sees her schizoaffective disorder as one of several chronic illnesses she manages, not as a master identity. She writes about Lyme symptoms, dysautonomia, and PTSD in the same register as her psychiatric diagnoses. This integrated view — body and mind as a single, complicated system — is more honest about lived experience than the older sharp divide between "mental" and "physical" illness, and it is one of the book's lasting contributions.
Where to start
If you want to begin with one essay, "Toward a Pathology of the Possessed" or the title essay "The Collected Schizophrenias" are good entry points. If you want a fuller sense of what living with the diagnosis can look like in middle adulthood, the entire collection is short enough to read in a few sittings. For broader context, our overview of living with schizoaffective disorder covers the clinical features Wang describes in literary form.
This article is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Diagnoses of public and historical figures are summarised from publicly available accounts and biographical sources, not direct clinical assessment. If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 in the US, or your local emergency number.