Wang begins the book on relative terra firma: In an essay titled “Diagnosis,” she lays out the basics of not only her own diagnosis, schizoaffective disorder, but also the other flavors of schizophrenia. She quotes liberally from the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (D.S.M.-5). She covers the history of psychosis from the ancient Egyptians, who attributed it to a poisoned heart and uterus, to Eugen Bleuler, the early-20th-century Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term “schizophrenia.” She runs through the nature and nurture of schizophrenia and theories about the possible evolutionary utility of the disease (ranging from schizophrenia being an unfortunate stowaway on genes for communication and creativity to schizophrenics as “ad hoc ‘cult leaders’ whose bizarre ideas split off chunks of the human population”).

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However, in a pattern she’ll repeat in subsequent essays, almost as soon as Wang has established a shared reality between herself and the reader — schizophrenia exists and here are its parameters — she begins to undermine that reality. She points out the dehumanizing aspect of her D.S.M.-5 diagnosis — “it shrink-wraps the bloody circumstance with objectivity until the words are colorless” — and describes the D.S.M. as “like the Judeo-Christian Bible, one that warps and mutates as quickly as our culture does.” She raises the idea that “my experiences with psychosis are a spiritual gift rather than a psychiatric anomaly.” And she makes clear the mind-altering power of the diagnosis itself: “Giving someone a diagnosis of schizophrenia will impact how they see themselves. It will change how they interact with friends and family. The diagnosis will affect how they are seen by the medical community, the legal system, the Transportation Safety Administration and so on.”

The first half of “The Collected Schizophrenias” spirals around the human rights of mentally ill people. Wang considers the ethics of involuntary treatment (having experienced it, including being put into restraints, she’s against it). She highlights the irony and pathos of her strenuous efforts to seem more “high-functioning” than other people with schizophrenia by keeping her signature red lipstick crisp, wearing designer clothing, flashing her wedding band and exalted alma maters (she attended both Yale and Stanford: “‘I went to Yale’ is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless”), and, hilariously, when involuntarily hospitalized in Louisiana, trouncing “the other patients in a mandatory group therapy word game, not allowing anyone else to score a point.” In the wryly titled essay “Yale Will Not Save You,” she argues that universities are not doing enough to accommodate mentally ill students (and delivers perhaps the most evocative description ever of a swampy New Haven late summer as “hot and damp like the inside of a feverish mouth”).

Wang’s essay on her and her husband’s decision not to have children (“The Choice of Children”) is the saddest and most successful in the book. Wang is able to show off her novelist’s eye for detail, character and dialogue in her description of her time spent working at a camp for children with bipolar disorder. And her prismatic approach to ethical questions serves her especially well here: Would Wang be heartbroken if her child were “like her”? Is being like Wang so very bad? Would Wang’s child hate her? Or might Wang, mindful of her illness, be an exceptionally good parent?

In later essays, Wang examines various types of delusions, from the banality of children’s imaginary games to the immersive experience of an IMAX film, and lays bread crumbs from these familiar landmarks most of us have experienced to the most exotic forms of psychosis she has suffered (Wang once became convinced that she was dead and living in an eternal hell in a rare syndrome called Cotard’s delusion). Her descriptions of what it’s like to descend into psychosis are viscerally enlightening: “The more I consider the world, the more I realize that it’s supposed to have a cohesion that no longer exists, or that it is swiftly losing — either because it is pulling itself apart, because it has never been cohesive, because my mind is no longer able to hold the pieces together, or, most likely, some jumbled combination of the above.” She continues that it “feels like breaking through a thin barrier to another world that sways and bucks and won’t throw me back through again, no matter how many pills I swallow or how much I struggle to return.”