The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays Quotes
"Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy. Craziness scares us because we are creatures who long for structure and sense."
"People speak of schizophrenics as though they were dead without being dead, gone in the eyes of those around them."
"Because the schizophrenic does suffer. I have been psychically lost in a pitch-dark room."
"I am aware of the implications of the word 'afflicts,' which supports a neurotypical bias, but I also believe in the suffering of people diagnosed with the schizophrenias and our tormenting minds."
"Some people dislike diagnoses, disagreeably calling them boxes and labels, but I’ve always found comfort in preexisting conditions."
"A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage—and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure."
"I received the new diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder after twelve years of being considered bipolar, in the middle of a psychiatric crisis that went on for ten months."
"Schizophrenia is the most familiar of the psychotic disorders. Schizoaffective disorder is less familiar to the layperson."
"Medicine is an inexact science, but psychiatry is particularly so. There is no blood test, no genetic marker to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that someone is schizophrenic."
"Psychiatry emphasizes a clinician’s judgment as the primary tool for diagnosis."
"Giving someone a diagnosis of schizophrenia will impact how they see themselves. It will change how they interact with friends and family."
"The most common complaint about the DSM-5, and the DSM versions that came before it, is that the disorders it lists are based on clusters of symptoms rather than objective measures."
"Schizophrenia is confusing, off-putting, nonsensical, unpredictable, inexplicable, and just plain bad."
"Schizophrenia is also conflated with dissociative identity disorder, more commonly known as multiple personality disorder, due to the vernacular use of 'split personality' to refer to a disorder unrelated to fractured personalities."
"Schizophrenia is the domain of the slovenly. I stand outside of its boundaries as a straight-backed ingenue, and there is no telltale smearing beyond the borders of my mouth."
"They told one another that someday they’d be rich enough to eat at Pizza Hut anytime they wanted."
"In fifth grade, I wrote a two-hundred-page novel about a kidnapped girl who becomes a cat."
"'I went to Yale' is shorthand for I have schizoaffective disorder, but I’m not worthless."
"I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the summer before I left for New Haven."
"Stigma clouded the visits, but I quickly learned that I could pretend to be visiting the Gynecology Department."
"Yale is the third-oldest university in the country, after Harvard, which is the oldest, and after the College of William and Mary, which was established in 1693."
"Yale introduced me to swooning over course descriptions in the Blue Book; 'shopping period'; my being openly queer."
"Yale is mocked for its determination to be elite from the get-go."
"I left Yale for good in early 2003, although I did not know at the time that it was the end."
"I took classes at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts, and I worked as a web designer too."
"In 2014, Katie J. M. Baker published an article in Newsweek titled 'How Colleges Flunk Mental Health.'"
"I used to shoplift. Rarely did I take anything substantial."
"I was a nobody and I know how to calm someone down long enough to get them to consent [to hospitalization voluntarily]."
"The Slender Man, according to lore, kidnaps and preys on children."
"At one point during the hours of waiting, I grew bored and tried to wriggle my hand out of its cuff."
"Imagination has a power in childhood that it lacks in older years."
"Where the puzzle gets tricky is in children’s natural proclivity for the line between fake and real."
"Though I wasn’t diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder till much later, I am intrigued by my second-grade willingness to forgo even friendship for the sake of my version of unreality."
"I eventually became friends with Jessica again, sacrificing my adherence to our version of Fantasia in order to repair our relationship."
"Schizophrenia is one of the most serious and one of the most studied mental illnesses of human beings."
"Children are prone to believing in the things that they pretend are real."
"During a psychotic episode the winter before, C. and I had watched Doctor Who together."
"The feeling of my mind entering a state of rapid fracture is familiar enough now that I can describe the terrain."
"Suicide demands a narrative, but rarely, if ever, gives one."
"I am older now by over a decade than Francesca Woodman was when she died, and older than I was when I saw the exhibition of her work at SFMOMA."
"I am constantly misplacing various symbols of achievement—I have no idea where my diplomas are, or the medal, though I continue to strive for more achievements, and more honors."
"Illness draws me to places such as this."
"I am not afraid. I was born to do this."
"If an autoimmune disorder of the brain could so closely resemble psychiatric illnesses, then what, really, were these illnesses?"
"The immune system can wage a misguided attack on a person’s central or peripheral nervous system."
"Lyme disease might have escalated my existing psychiatric condition by triggering an immune reaction."
"This worry became inflamed when Amy parked the car and apologized for how far we would have to walk."
"Hope is a cast line in search of fish; faith is the belief that you won’t starve to death."
"I saw El Santuario as being built on hope, which is not the same thing as faith."
"The possibility of uncovering something new thrilled me, and I anticipated the visit with fervor."
"Hope, I write in my journal, is a curse and a gift."
"All I can do now is wait for spontaneous remission."
"I am not willing to experiment to see which."
"But what if the voice held some sort of function?"
"In Women Who Run with the Wolves, Estés uses the story of Vasalisa and the Baba Yaga to caution against dithering in other realms."
"The sacred arts have given me some solace not so much through the beliefs they provide as through the actions they recommend."
"If I must live with a slippery mind, I want to know how to tether it too."