Rachel Aviv | Strangers to Ourselves

“At times, I contemplated devoting the entire book to each life I have written about here, but I wanted to emphasize the diversity of experiences of mental illness, the fact that, when questions are examined from different angles, the answers continually change. The book begins by telling the story of a man torn between the twentieth century’s dominant explanations for mental distress—the psychodynamic and the biochemical. The rest of the chapters move beyond these two prevailing frameworks: one character tries to understand who she is in relation to her guru and gods; another is reckoning with her country’s racist history and how it has shaped her mind; a third has been so defined by psychiatric concepts that she doesn’t know how to explain her suffering on its own terms. In this sense, the book is about missing stories, the facets of identity that our theories of the mind fail to capture. It’s impossible to go back in time and uncover what baseline feelings existed before a story was told—when a person’s angst and loneliness and disorientation had yet to be given a name and a vessel—but I find myself searching for the gap between people’s experiences and the stories that organize their suffering, sometimes defining the course of their lives.” Rachel Aviv