Book - Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us

by Rachel Aviv, a New York Times bestseller. Paperback, 275 pages, published 2022. This is a non-fiction title, containing about 35 pages of Notes in the back. Very good used condition. There is one tear to a corner (see pics) but it does not affect the physical integrity of the book. The binding is tight and all pages are intact. No writing, no highlighting. "Rachel Aviv poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. How do the stories we tell about mental disorders shape our lives and our identities? Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of the 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 of her medication because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, this gripping exploration is refracted through Aviv's own personal 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."