Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

De: Rachel Aviv

Narrado por: Andi Arndt

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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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

Just Falls Short ...

What works when dealing with mental illness? What is mental illness? How do we view our own emotional and mental states?

The answers to these questions shift depending on the individual, the culture a person comes from and the prevailing understanding of illness and treatment at the time. Rachel Aviv's book explores the tangle of diagnosis and treatment, individual response to family and culture, and the difficulty separating these powerful forces. She writes movingly about four people whose mental illness can be linked to their role in their own society, their feelings of alienation and isolation from the prevailing culture, their struggle to understand themselves and the struggles of their family, friends and doctors to understand and heal them.

But how are these stories linked? What do they have in common? Aviv demurs from pulling these strands together explicitly.

Even if she is not in a position to make a Grand Statement about mental illness, culture and narrative, I wish Aviv had made some more explicit attempt in that direction. Aviv is powerfully descriptive but she shies away from the outright analytic. Is she afraid to do so lest she find her own argument outmoded or viewed as benighted in the future? Even if Aviv's conclusion is that mental illness is too complex, too personal, too culturally explicit for a grand theory ever to work, I would like to hear it!

The reader was very good, but I wish the production had permitted more of a silent break between chapters. Jarring to end one narrative about a person whose life was destroyed by mental illness and misguided treatment and launch right into the next. Radio silence is not an evil - at least not for a whole 5 or 10 seconds!

Very powerful

I loved this book! What a wonderful writer, and excellent narrator. If you're interested in mental health, these very perceptive and fascinating case histories will move you and make you think.

Powerful look at mental health

Great collection of experiences to explore the history and complexity of mental health and society.

Mental health is broken in our country

There is no mental health in our country. This was a true awakening for me.

Makes you think

I really enjoyed this book. It helped me out a lot with new ways of thinking of mental health and how I should look at it.