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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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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
"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."
"Approved insight, the kind that informs 'correct' narratives, exerts real and lasting power, whether damaging (Aviv's focus) or healing, as is often the case."
"Woven throughout is an intimate examination of the roles that injustice and inequality play in mental distress and of the evolution and limitations of modern psychiatric practic ..."
"Aviv's triumphs in relating these journeys are many: her unerring narrative instinct, the breadth of context brought to each story, her meticulous reporting."
"a compassionate and necessary exploration of the complex relationship between how we understand ourselves and how psychiatric diagnoses define us."
"This eye-opening examination makes for a valuable addition to modern discourse around mental illness."
"Aviv treats her subjects with both scholarly interest and genuine compassion ..."
"This isn't an anti-psychiatry book — Aviv is too aware of the specifics of any situation to succumb to anything so sweeping and polemical."
"The result is a human chronicle that is intimate and unpredictable."
"hat she avoids these easy positions is testament to the open, curious nature of her inquiry."
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