Strangers to Ourselves

by Rachel Aviv

English language

Published Nov. 30, 2022 by Penguin Random House.

ISBN:: 978-1-78730-169-6

(3 reviews)

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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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 …

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.

"For years, I have devoured Rachel Aviv’s nuanced New Yorker features on challenging topics like brain death, the “troubled teen” industry, and the mutability of memory. Her first book is just as gripping and subtle in its exploration of how psychiatric explanations of behavior can both limit and fail to capture who we are. Starting with her own story of being hospitalized for anorexia at age 6, Aviv explores the “psychic hinterlands,” profiling how five others journeyed through “the outer edges of human experience.” This deeply empathetic book raises probing questions about our psychiatric system and the very nature of self-identity."

— Kristen Martin, writer and book critic

4 editions

Erin reviewed Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

Review of 'Strangers to Ourselves' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Weird book! There’s almost no analysis here. It’s primarily the narrative of these lives as it relates to their mental health. A main theme is the challenge of diagnosis and the ways in which we have muddled through what effective mental health treatment is.

Sometimes this was boring because it was really quite exhaustive. It’s a play by play of every step in their mental health journeys. At other times it was thought provoking, but not always because the author brought up a question. It was more that the book just made me reflect. The one exception is how Aviv discussed anti depressants in Laura’s chapter. She herself reflects on the goal of treatment and how to determine what a person’s baseline is.

I appreciate how Aviv covered systemic problems and Western biases in mental health care. I thought she did a good job recognizing the bigger picture.

But overall …

Annie the Book reviewed Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

Strangers to Ourselves, by Rachel Aviv

5 stars

In Strangers to Ourselves, Rachel Aviv presents a series of portraits of mental illness, portraits that call into question a raft of preconceived notions about what it means to be considered insane. Aviv’s collection is one of the most evenhanded arguments for reconsideration of how we treat the mentally ill. It’s not a polemic against Big Pharma. It’s also not a call to ditch psychiatry wholesale. Instead, Aviv shows us that mental illness is just really complicated.

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.

actuallym

rated it

Oct 4