Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

by Rachel Aviv

This sense of narrow escape has made me attentive to the windows in the early phases of an illness, when a condition is consuming and disabling but has not yet remade a person’s identity and social world. Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially in the beginning, can shape their course. People can feel freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.

“Madness has become an industrialized product to be managed efficiently and rationally in a timely manner,”

Delusions are not spun from pure fantasy. It would be impossible to separate Bapu’s desire to wed Krishna from her dismay over the way that wives in traditional Indian households were treated; or Ray’s obsession with avenging his failed life and career, his fall from grace, from his expectation that white educated men should not have to contend with such a fate.