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Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
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About This Book
In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv raises fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn't know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv's exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel―until it no longer does. Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.
Reviews
"Aviv draws on unpublished journals as well as interviews with family members and experts."
"I zipped through each essay—propelled by curiosity—yet needed to take breaks between them, both to recover from the intensity of the human experience described and to sit with the implications of the argument Aviv is building, which suggests that it may be more harmful than helpful to see yourself the way doctors see you ..."
"She respects her subjects, and so centers their dignity without indulging in the geeky, condescending tone of fascination that can characterize psychologists' accounts of their patients' troubles."
"thought-provoking ..."
"Aviv is an instinctive storyteller and her book's episodic, immersive format is underpinned by in-depth reporting as she tracks down those closest to her subjects ..."
"They can be salvational, oppressive, or something in between; they can work primarily for our benefit, or for others."
"We all have our own minds, our own experiences, our own suffering; we are also social creatures who live among others, and social forces have at least some bearing on how we understand who we are ..."
"We should still take our solutions where we can find them, of course, as long as we don't become too attached to an idea of their everlasting categorical truth."
"Her profiles are memorable and empathetic ..."
"The book is organized around a profound and plausible hypothesis: that the stories people tell themselves about their mental disorders shape the course of their lives."
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