Strangers to Ourselves: Stories of Unsettled Minds

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The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our deepest sense of who we are Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and deeply researched look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on conversations as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, it follows people who have found that psychiatric language has limitations when it comes to explaining who they are, or that a diagnosis, while giving their experience a name, creates a sense of a future life they wish to question or resist. Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy- she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being institutionalized at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a mother recovering from psychosis and rebuilding her relationship with her children; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it. Through startling connections, intimate testimonies and diverse cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, profoundly human.

Reviews

A subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed ... Aviv is an instinctive storyteller... meticulous, empathic, tirelessly inquisitive. -- Hephzibah Anderson * Observer *
So attuned to subtlety and complexity... a book-length demonstration of Aviv's extraordinary ability to hold space for the "uncertainty, mysteries and doubt" of others. * New York Times Book Review *
Profoundly intelligent ... superbly written portraits ... [A] remarkable book. * Guardian *
Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness... a human chronicle that is intimate and unpredictable... Instead of demonizing disorders of the mind, Aviv seeks to understand their causes. * The Times *
An incredibly researched, empathetic, and moving book. * Lit Hub *

Author Bio

Rachel Aviv is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about medicine, education, criminal justice, and other subjects. In 2022, she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. A 2019 national fellow at New America, she received a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant to support her work on Strangers to Ourselves. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.