The Collected Schizophrenias

Content Warning: This section contains discussions of suicide.

Wang opens this essay with a paragraph she wrote during a psychotic episode referred to as Cotard’s delusion, “in which the patient believes they are dead” (145). Despite thinking she is dead, she knows that because she thinks, she must exist.

In 2013, Wang began training to perform talks aimed at destigmatizing mental illness. Before this, she experienced her longest psychotic episode, which was signaled by weeks of scattered thinking and behavior. During this period, she accomplished many minor tasks in an attempt to “assemble the parts of [her] mind which had begun to fall apart” (146).

Cotard’s delusion is a rare disorder that is theorized to be related to Capgras delusion, or the lack of emotion toward loved ones’ faces that leads to a belief that they have been replaced. Wang refers to an episode of Hannibal, which features Cotard’s delusion in a crass manner and results in a woman killing people in horrible ways. She remarks on the irony of the feeling and how joyous it made her to think she was getting a chance to start over with a new life.

It was also during this time that Wang’s doctor implied that they had tried every relatively safe medication, and it was time for her to accept her diagnosis and live with it.