A FISH GROWING LUNGS

A collection of essays about the deleterious effects of a serious medical misdiagnosis.

When she was 18, Sawchyn, a features editor for the Rumpus, ended up in a hospital after her mother found her sitting in her room, “knees pulled into my chest, face pushed into my knees, arms wrapped around myself as far as they would go, rocking forward and back, muttering.” She was diagnosed with bipolar I. This diagnosis, she writes, “would shape the next seven years of my life,” a period during which she “lived afraid of my own mind, both what it was capable of and what others would think and do if they found out about it.” She eventually learned that she had been misdiagnosed, that her teenage “riotous self-will” and capacity for self-harm were attributable to factors that therapy and medication only made worse. In these essays, Sawchyn paints a chilling portrait of her ordeal, her strained relations with members of her biracial family, and similar struggles endured by people close to her, including a boyfriend who made several unsuccessful attempts at suicide and a graduate school classmate with “pale scars tracked up the inside of her left arm that matched those on my right.” The book’s final essays—about a roommate in the Midwest, visits to a Florida goth club, and attempts at religious education—add little to the insights that came before. Yet the author is bracingly honest throughout, as when she writes that, although she’s better now, her urge to self-mutilate remains. “My brain,” she writes, “says that if I tear my flesh, the hurt inside will stop, will mutate into a form I can salve.” Sawchyn’s gift for memorable descriptions makes her ordeal all the more visceral, as when she writes about the effects of Klonopin: “Swallowing [the pills] felt like prescription sunglasses over your whole body.”

A potent cautionary tale about the dangers of psychiatric misdiagnoses and the stigma of mental illness.