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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.
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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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 ...
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us is a 2022 non-fiction book by Rachel Aviv [1] that focuses on mental illness, diagnosis, and people in extreme mental distress.
Strangers to Ourselves is a work of landmark reporting that is truly heartbreaking and astonishing.” — Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning “Aviv writes with an unpredictable mixture of intimacy and distance, exploring how psychiatric language often alters what it names.
Review: “Strangers to Ourselves,” by Rachel Aviv - The New York Times
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities?
Callie Hitchcock gets to know “Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us,” a new analysis of mental illness by Rachel Aviv.