02680cam a2200385 i 4500 616157055 TxAuBib 20230117120000.0 220601s2022||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2022021878 9780374600846 0374600848 40031351615 (OCoLC)1331750176 TxAuBib rda Aviv, Rachel,. Strangers to ourselves : unsettled minds and the stories that make us / Rachel Aviv. First edition. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ©2022. 276 pages ; 22 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier Includes bibliographical references. Prologue: Rachel "Someone better than me" -- Ray "Am I really this? Am I not this? What am I?" -- Bapu "Is this difficulty I am facing the lesson of total surrender?" -- Naomi "You're not listening to me" -- Laura "He could read my mind, as though I didn't need to explain myself" -- Epilogue: Hava "Stranger to myself". "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"-- Provided by publisher. 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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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. 20230117. Mentally ill Biography. Psychotherapy patients Biography. Psychiatric hospital patients Biography. Biographies. Biographies.