Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us by Rachel Aviv

Acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives, challenging the way we understand mental illness.“[A] penetrating landmark book . . . Aviv has created an arresting work of profound empathy and insight.” —Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing 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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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 thro