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.
Strangers
to Ourselves poses 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original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs,
Rachel 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 gripping 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--and our identities, too. Challenging the way we
understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the
porousness and resilience of the mind.