Maddi Carroll’s Reviews > The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays > Status Update

“My head had lodged behind a bone in my mother's pelvis, which hints of an intergenera-tional transmission of trauma; stress causes the flooding of cortisol and other chemicals into the brain, and my newly immigrated, newly married young mother had her own psychiatric issues to contend with. Who knows what happens to the malleable and muddy assortment of fetal cells because of such strain?”

“After all, it is easy to forget that psychiatric diagnoses are human constructs, and not handed down from an all-knowing God on stone tablets; to ‘have schizophrenia’ is to fit an assemblage of symptoms, which are listed in a purple book made by humans.”

“A diagnosis is comforting because it provides a framework—a community, a lineage-and, if luck is afoot, a treatment or cure.
A diagnosis says that I am crazy, but in a particular way: one that has been experienced and recorded not just in modern times, but also by the ancient Egyptians…]”