Strangers to ourselves : unsettled minds and the stories that make us
Book |
Bond Street Books/Doubleday Canada,
Toronto :
[2022]
- 2 of 3 Copies Available at Libraries in Niagara Cooperative
- 0 current holds with 3 total copies.
| Branch | Call Number | Location | Holdable? | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Niagara-on-the-Lake | 0800 AVI | Adult Health & Wellness | Copy hold / Volume hold | Checked out |
| Thorold | 616.890092 AVIV | Nonfiction | Copy hold / Volume hold | Available |
| Welland Main | 616.8900922 Avi | Adult Non-fiction | Copy hold / Volume hold | Available |
About
Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, that define us. But how much do the stories we tell about our illnesses--and the process of diagnosis--inform their course? In Strangers to Ourselves, a powerful and gripping debut, Rachel Aviv writes about how explanations for mental distress may shape our health, our sense of who we are, and the possibilities for who we can be in the world. Drawing on deep, original reporting and unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv follows an Indian woman, celebrated as a saint, who lived in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after a period of psychosis; a man seeking revenge against a prominent psychoanalytic hospital through a lawsuit that dramatizes the clash between two irreconcilable models of the mind; an affluent young woman whose lifelong psychiatric treatment eventually leads her to go off her meds in a desperate attempt to figure out who she would be without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv's exploration is refracted through her own account of being institutionalized at the age of six and meeting Hava, a friend and fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel--until it no longer does. While the stories unfold in different eras and cultures, they converge in the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience. Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations and endeavor to recover a sense of agency, in search of new ways to understand a self in the world. Challenging conventional ideas of mental disease as something static, Aviv's accounts are testaments to the porousness and resilience of the mind.
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Details
- ISBN: 9780385684460
- Physical Description: 276 pages ; 22 cm
- Publisher: Toronto : Bond Street Books/Doubleday Canada, [2022]
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Bibliography, etc. Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index.