PHOTO: Sandra Yuen, artist, author, and mental health advocate, photographed near her instruments of choice—paintbrush, drumsticks, and a well-loved typewriter.
Art Words Music Recovery And Hope
Sandra Yuen reflects on transforming mental illness into creative expression through writing, visual art, and music, offering hope, humour, and insight into recovery and the inner world of an artist.
Sandra Yuen writes with a fierce clarity earned through lived experience, resilience, and extraordinary creative depth. Diagnosed with schizophrenia at just fifteen, she has turned what many would consider limitation into a life of expansive artistry. Her path—shaped by recovery, expression, and advocacy—is a powerful testament to the alchemy of courage and creativity.
Whether behind a drum kit, at the easel, or with a pen in hand, Yuen approaches each medium with a raw, searching honesty. Her memoir, My Schizophrenic Life: The Road to Recovery from Mental Illness, is not merely a narrative of illness and healing—it’s a mirror held up to a world that too often misunderstands both. Her novel Chop Shtick, laced with wit and poignancy, reveals an author unafraid to find absurdity within tragedy, light within shadows.
There’s a quiet wisdom in Yuen’s voice, one that speaks not only of survival but of vision. Her characters are richly drawn from the artistic circles she inhabits—figures who carry the complex truths of living on society’s margins while cultivating beauty, insight, and laughter. For Sandra Yuen, storytelling is more than catharsis—it is connection, reclamation, and an offering of hope.
What inspired you to share your personal journey in My Schizophrenic Life, and how did you find the writing process?
I was diagnosed with a form of schizophrenia at age 15. I had a major relapse at age 32 and was re-diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a combination of schizophrenia and a mood disorder. I joined The Art Studios, an organization that offers art classes to people in recovery from mental illness. I was encouraged to tell my story of recovery. That led to many mental health-focused articles in The Bulletin, a magazine published by the West Coast Mental Health Network. From there, I decided I had enough material to write a memoir about my illness and ways I learned to cope.
How does your experience as a visual artist influence your storytelling in fiction and memoir?
Being a visual artist may have aided me in visualizing scenes and creating characters but the stronger influences were my mental illness and curious mind. In my youth, I had auditory hallucinations and developed a fictional world in which I resided. I remembered many quotable events which I wrote into my memoir. The blurring of reality and fiction allowed my mind to conceive bizarre and humorous events in Chop Shtick. To see things through an altered state of mind.
Chop Shtick combines humour with serious themes—what challenges did you face in balancing comedy with more poignant moments?
I didn’t really consider it a challenge, more that each passage or chapter had a certain focus to push the story forward. I drew on different emotions and traits to create caricatures of the characters. Humour was designed to complement the more tragic parts of the story. Comedy also made Cathy, the protagonist’s story, easier to swallow and aided the reader in finding humour and perspective when addressing serious or difficult topics around mental illness, loss, fear, etc.
In From New York to Vancouver: Stories on the Fly, how did co-authoring with James D. Young shape your writing, and what was it like collaborating across continents?
James did most of the editing and was smooth sailing to work with! We structured the first novella “Untitled Story” by alternating writing each chapter. It was really intriguing, because one didn’t know where the plot was going and each chapter was a surprise! We did finally meet up in New York in person. It was a grand occasion! He has a great deal of wit and is still sharp as a whip nearing 80. He is a true New York, a former marine, and dandy writer.
Mental health advocacy is a major part of your work—how has speaking publicly about your experiences impacted your life and others?
Interesting question. I once had extremely low self-esteem, but through speaking about mental illness, I was recognized for my accomplishments despite my illness. This gave me confidence and decreased my depression because I was helping others. I still received a bachelor’s degree in art history at the University of British Columbia and had a long career as an artist and received the Courage to Come Back Award and the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for overcoming severe adversity to give back to the community. I have given over 190 talks to students, professionals and families about mental illness and recovery and wrote many articles about the same. I have received letters and contact from people as far as England about the impact of my memoir, written as a firsthand experience of psychosis and bipolar disorder.
Your characters often have artistic or creative backgrounds—do you see them as reflections of your own identity or something broader?
Many characters in My Schizophrenic Life and Chop Shtick are creatives because the stories are loosely based on people in my community. Not only do these characters, and the protagonists mirror my attitudes, sardonic wit, fears and triumphs, but they also demonstrate the difficult life of the artist. And highlights the parallel between the mentally ill and creative ability, not just as therapy but as a gift that many people with lived experience have which aids them in self-expression and sharing insights into madness.
What has the reception been like for your books within both the mental health and literary communities?
My Schizophrenic Life was very well received by the mental health community. I’d like to mention that some of my poems and prose were recently published in Off the Map by Bell Press Books and one poem was written up in the Seaboard Review of Books. Also I am scheduled to release a poetry book called I Want To Be Buried Standing Up in fall 2025 or soon after.
What advice would you give to emerging authors, particularly those writing about deeply personal or stigmatised topics?
Be clear on which information you want to be public about or not. Respect yourself and confidential information in your writing. Non-fiction autobiographies and biographies and poetry are great niches to explore insights, pain, anger, trauma, solutions and strategies in one’s life. Sometimes it’s good to have an outcome, a conclusion or an open ending of possibilities or tragedy as in any good story. Find significant events to write about in your life and write effectively to make them worthy.
