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

by Rachel Aviv

The French philosopher René Girard describes anorexia as being rooted in “the desire not to be a saint but to be regarded as one.” He writes, “There is great irony in the fact that the modern process of stamping out religion produces countless caricatures of it.”

He and his team suggested that a psychiatric hospital would be the “appropriate placement for Rachel.” But he wrote that my parents decided to hold off on “this recommendation for the time being.” My mom was shocked by the suggestion. “I feared once you’d gone into that system of psychiatric institutions, it may have been very difficult to pull you out,” she told me.

Culture shapes the scripts that expressions of distress will follow. In both anorexia and resignation syndrome, children embody anger and a sense of powerlessness by refusing food, one of the few methods of protest available to them.

insight measures the degree to which a patient agrees with his or her doctor’s interpretation.

the surgeon general announced that there is “no scientific justification for distinguishing between mental illness and other forms of illness.”

The divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable, a fact that I find both haunting and promising.

long-term treatment with antidepressants has become a cure for people who feel inadequate.

I felt a little deflated upon realizing that David’s thumbnail sketch of my childhood was not particular to me. I was among a large class of girls finding the same misguided solution to roughly the same type of tensions, often in similar social settings.

“each person that was doing well was attributing their newfound life to God.” They were able to move on, it seemed, because they had reoriented their lives around a new story.

She gave birth to her son, Jonathan, in 2002. Less than a week later, she and Gail delivered him to his new family. “We sat on the floor and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed,” Gail told me. “That was the most painful thing I have ever done: giving that baby away.” Hava later described the adoption as “the one good thing I feel I did on the face of this Earth.”

I was standing near the open door of my hospital room when I heard a voice. I listened closely and the sound grew fainter, as if it were somehow folding in on itself. There was a kind of taunting echo, like the noise that can be heard when you hold a conch shell to your ear. This noise was categorically different from anything I had ever heard before and anything I’ve heard since. It was what William James, in his essay on the “unclassified residuum,” might have described as one of those “wild facts, with no stall or pigeon-hole.”

what are these emotional experiences of the mentally disturbed other than human experiences of the kind we all go through, seen as if under a magnifying glass?