IN ARTHUR FRANK’S The Wounded Storyteller, he notes that much the greater part of the available literature on most illnesses comes from observers who are studying it, typically aiming at a detached objectivity, and that we would benefit from having more complementary subjective accounts from people who actually have the illness, describing it from the inside.
Schizophrenia may be a case where the objective presentation and the subjective experience vary most bafflingly. The illness itself is not very fully understood. Wang’s title alludes to the tendency of the illness’s very name to undergo periodic revisions, to say nothing of its treatment or its diagnosis. As she mentions in the book’s first essay, diagnosis of schizophrenia depends not on any straightforward yes-or-no lab test, like cancer or tuberculosis, but on sets of criteria that change from one edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to the next.
The Collected Schizophrenias has thirteen essays from someone who has the illness, whatever exactly it is—how it feels like subjectively, how people respond to you, how it is represented in our culture, what hardly anyone understands about it. Regrettably, describing the book that way makes it sound like a twin of Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold (2007), and it isn’t at all, although I’m not sure how to identify the difference. Wang’s book is...more baroque, perhaps? More writerly? More millennial? More post-Foucault? I don’t know. They are quite different, and both worth reading.
Wang mentions Saks’s book in passing, but does not say much about it. I’d be curious to know what she thinks of it.
Tangential remark: without my intending it, 2020 has become a year in which I read several autobiographically inflected books by Asian-American women: Victoria Chang, Trisha Low, Cathy Park Hong, and this one. I wonder if some sort of wave is occurring.
No comments:
Post a Comment