The Collected Schizophrenias

My 8 highlights

• The prospect of any kind of therapy felt to me like a suggestion that I sit down and meditate in a burning building.

• When asked, “What do people who live successfully with schizophrenia have in common?” for an awareness-raising social media campaign, Dr. Ashish Bhatt answered, “Often those persons who live successfully with schizophrenia are ones who have positive prognostic factors, which include good premorbid functioning, later age of symptom onset, sudden symptom onset, higher education, good support system, early diagnosis and treatment, medication adherence, and longer periods of minimal or absent symptoms between episodes.”

• In high school, when I told my mother that I was thinking of suicide, she suggested that we kill ourselves together, which I didn’t fully recognize as the bizarre response it was until I told the story again and again over the following decades of my life.

• A person experiencing psychosis can seldom describe the ongoing turmoil with any kind of eloquence, but they might be able to tell you what it was like in hindsight, when the damage is in the rear window.

• Rarely did I experience such a radical and visceral imbalance of power as I did as a psychiatric inpatient amid clinicians who knew me only as illness in human form.

• Chaédria LaBouvier’s work on the concept of “using beauty and style in direct, political ways that subvert dehumanizing expectations

• No one ever says that a person is cancer, or that they have become cancer, but they do say that a person is manic-depressive or schizophrenic, once those illnesses have taken hold

• Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, but I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions; I like to know that I’m not pioneering an inexplicable experience.