Strangers to Ourselves

July 4, 2022
New Yorker staff writer Aviv debuts with a collection of thought-provoking journalistic profiles of people with mental illness. From a depressed self-aggrandizing physician to a mother who murders one of her twins during a mental health episode to a Harvard-educated debutante with bipolar disorder, Aviv details how six individuals have navigated the boundaries of scientific understandings of mental illness and developed self-understanding through psychiatric treatment. The author includes her own story: She was diagnosed with anorexia at age six and committed to a hospital, where she encountered the power of diagnoses to shape one’s self-conception: “There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which.” Aviv uses interviews, subjects’ journals, and the writings of such figures as Sigmund Freud and psychiatrist Roland Kuhn to study how illness affects how one sees oneself. For example, the journals of Aviv’s subject Bapu, an Indian woman with schizophrenia, pay little heed to her diagnosis and treat her connection with the Hindu god Krishna as real. Aviv’s considerable storytelling abilities are on full display here as she renders compassionate and nuanced portraits of individuals wrestling to gain a coherent sense of identity from the limited lexicon of psychiatry. This eye-opening examination makes for a valuable addition to modern discourse around mental illness.