Pills won and by the 1990s, depression was widely held to be the result of a chemical imbalance, a view that has only recently begun to be challenged.

Ray wound up suing an elite hospital famed for its commitment to the talking cure, triggering a legal showdown between two competing approaches to mental illness: the Freudian and the pharmaceutical. When a charismatic physician named Ray sought help for his depression in 1979, for instance, psychoanalysis still held sway. Woven throughout is an intimate examination of the roles that injustice and inequality play in mental distress and of the evolution and limitations of modern psychiatric practice.

It drives home her view that “our illnesses are not just contained in our skull but are also made and sustained by our relationships and communities”. Among them is Naomi, a black single mother from Minnesota who was convicted of murder after jumping into the Mississippi with her infant twins, certain that racist killers were hunting her, and Hava, an older girl from the anorexia clinic whom Aviv came to idolise during her brief stay there and whose life would take a course at once sadly predictable and surprising.Īviv is an instinctive storyteller and her book’s episodic, immersive format is underpinned by in-depth reporting as she tracks down those closest to her subjects. ‘Our illnesses are not just contained in our skull,’ says Aviv, they are ‘sustained by our relationships and communities’įramed by Aviv’s personal experience, Strangers to Ourselves profiles five “unsettled minds”, each embedded in a different political and cultural moment. That early apprehension fuels a conviction at the heart of her first book, a subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed, and the ways in which the language used – far from neutral – moulds a patient’s innermost self, promising to explain who they are by weaving narratives that free and entrap.

Brave writer reviews