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€14.80
New York Times Book Review Top 10 Books of the Year
‘Captures with subtlety and empathy the honest reality of mental illness’ The Times
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?
Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities?
Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.
‘Aviv finds language for the most ineffable registers of human experience’ Wall Street Journal
‘Profoundly intelligent? superbly written portraits’ Guardian
A best book of the year in the Los Angeles Times, Time, Washington Post, New Yorker, and Vogue
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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 Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are.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.
| Weight | 0.2 kg |
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| Dimensions | 19.4 × 12.8 × 2.2 cm |
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| Cover | Paperback |
| Pages | 288 |
| Language | English |
| Edition | |
| Dewey | 616.8900922 (edition:23) |
| Readership | General – Trade / Code: K |
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