In “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Esmé Weijun Wang Maps the Terrain of Her Mental Illness - The New Yorker

In “The Collected Schizophrenias,” Esmé Weijun Wang Maps the Terrain of Her Mental Illness  The New YorkerIn her new essay collection, Esmé Weijun Wang elucidates the experience of having a mind that is both her proudest asset and her biggest liability.Photograph by Jacquelyn Tierney “To be alive and sick is a far more complex endeavor than we like to admit,” Esmé Weijun Wang wrote in an essay for Catapult, in 2016. Wang would know: as a teen in the Bay Area, in 2001, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Twelve years later—eight years after her first auditory hallucination—she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder. When she began to experience new symptoms—weakness and fatigue, periph...