Strangers to Ourselves

Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

By: Rachel Aviv

Narrated by: Andi Arndt

Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

2022 The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Yea, Long-listed
2022 Vogue Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 Los Angeles Times Holiday Books Guide, Long-listed
2023 National Book Critics Circle Award - Nominee, Short-listed
2022 Wall Street Journal Best Books of the Yea, Long-listed
2022 BookPage Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 New Yorker Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 Time Magazine Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2022 Washington Post Best Books of the Year, Long-listed

The highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we 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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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 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.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

©2022 Rachel Aviv (P)2022 Macmillan Audio

Good read

Provocative Loved the first few chapters. The end was not as compelling as the beginning

Shines a Refreshing Light

I find this book shined a refreshing light on psychological traumas and how we throw medicine at it rather than stopping to listen and respect the person who is suffering from it.

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.

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!

How narrative changes our mental health outcomes

Anyone that’s ever discussed the issue of stigma in mental health will appreciate this book. It goes beyond that though.

By recounting a handful of illustrative individual stories, the author shines light on how the personal, cultural, and medical frames we use to explain our mental health struggles contribute to our outcomes in both positive and negative ways.

This book’s central thesis is hard to define, but it continually gave me reason to reflect on the explanatory power of mental health in my life.

It’s well worth reading.

Haunting

The focus on the aspect of context and circumstances that impact mental illness, it’s influence on people’s life trajectory and the socioeconomic factor is fascinating and chilling. There but for the grace….a great read, I listened to it in a day.

Incisive and painful. But well done.

I just wanted more. Each section was touching and wrenching but I still was left wanting more. A really personal dive into the different facets of mental health and how we change our psyche during stress and trauma.

Revelatory Journalism about the history of mental illness

Rachel Aviv has written an important account of the manifestation and treatment of mental illness through history, up to present day. Through her chosen subjects, Aviv illuminates how our environment, our access to mental health care, and even our individual diagnosis’ can contribute to what is essentially disordered thinking and subsequent behaviors. It is often our oppressive environments that not only cause, but exacerbate mental health issues.

In her story about Naomi I was struck by the part when she was in solitary confinement and began speaking a “different language.” Only a therapist who had known Naomi could understand her ramblings and in that simple act of listening and affirming, Naomi was able to find her way back from that psychosis.

This strikes me as one of the cohesive themes of mental illness and of Aviv’s subjects; people just wanted to be understood. They did not want to be pathologized, or medicated, or punished into assimilating. People just want to be understood and validated and loved, We all need someone to listen and learn our language of pain, and then affirm us. It is essential to the recovery process from any source of mental and emotional pain, imo.

This was a fantastic book. I would recommend it to anyone who has ever suffered from disordered thinking, or loves someone who has suffered from disordered thinking.

Important book

This book is full of important mental health stories
And is worth reading or listening too