Strangers to Ourselves

A thoughtful and deeply revealing exploration of how the meteoric rise of modern psychiatry--both its ever-shifting classifications and its pharmaceuticals--are altering our personal and cultural lives.

Inspired by her own experience of being institutionalized for an eating disorder at the age of six, Rachel Aviv has spent years getting to know and investigating several people who are journeying and wrestling with the medicalization of their unique (and fascinating) experiences. And in Strangers to Ourselves, we follow Aviv as she expertly chronicles how psychiatry has failed them or led them astray. Among those we meet: an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lived in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother seeking her children's forgiveness after a period of psychosis; and a man who spent decades plotting revenge against the country's most prominent psychoanalytic hospital, where he'd been treated for depression.

However, Strangers to Ourselves examines mental illness not just as a disorder of the individual, but as a reflection of the communities in which we live. As Rachel puts it: "All the stories in this book will share a setting: the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail." In this exploration she also draws connections to psychiatry as a force for colonialism, globalization and racism, shifting the book from gripping specificity to startling universality.

With exacting prose and a deep empathy for the people whose lives she chronicles, Aviv's sharpness as a writer, which we've long seen in her writing for The New Yorker, is on full display as she changes the way we see and understand mental illness.