Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
Book by Rachel Aviv
DETAILS
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux (September 13, 2022) Language : English Hardcover : 288 pages ISBN-10 : 0374600848 ISBN-13 : 978-0374600846 Item Weight : 14.2 ounces Dimensions : 8.3 x 1.1 x 5.4 inches Best Sellers Rank: #1,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #1 in Sociological Study of Medicine #2 in Medical Professional Biographies #11 in Popular Psychology Pathologies , A New York Times Book Review Ten Best Books of 2022 A Wall Street Journal Ten Best Books of 2022 The acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity. 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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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. Read more
REVIEW
“I was trapped in the life of a stranger.” The speaker is not alone in that sentiment. Through the case studies, eloquently and precisely explored in Rachel Aviv’s Stranger to Ourselves, we witness profound examples of individuals seeking to come to terms with various manifestations of mental illness. More specifically, as Ms. Aviv explains, “This book is about people whose struggle with mental illness exist outside what William James once called ‘a closed and completed system of truth.’” The cases were well selected involving, as they do, individuals from a spectrum of background and cultures, perhaps Ms. Aviv’s way of demonstrating that vulnerability to mental illness is more widespread than commonly understood. The subjects of her book, Ms. Aviv recognizes, “occupy the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail.” It is, Aviv states, impossible “to separate Bapu’s desire to wed Krishna from her dismay over the way that wives in traditional Indian households were treated; or Ray’s obsession with avenging his failed life and career, his fall from grace, from is expectation that white educated men should not have to contend with such fate.” None of the stories, in my view, was as disturbing and difficult to assimilate as that of Naomi. An African American female charged with and ultimately found guilty second degree murder after she lost her son during an attempted suicide. Strongly counseled against pleading insanity, her preferred plea, she served her time in the Shakopea Correctional Facility in Minnesota. Yet, on the day of her release date, the state decided “she was deemed ill enough to be indefinitely detained.” She fell, so it seems, somewhere between being sane upon beginning her sentence, but not psychologically fit to exit at her term’s end. How can it be that individuals once reasonably certain of themselves and their role in society can see that certainty disappear into a deep fog of unknowing? Alas, there are no simple answers, no happy ending promising a blissful future through drugs, psychotherapy, or other treatment modalities. For these people in the “psychic hinterlands” simple answers do not exist.
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