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

by Rachel Aviv

My mom also read about the illness, mostly from the psychoanalytic perspective that was dominant at the time, and internalized a common message: the mother was to blame. “It’s I who has caused all the pain—and the original injury,” she wrote in a spiral-bound journal that she often carried in her purse.

“I may be merely a crisp autumn leaf that blows away in a harsh October wind.”

She realized, she later wrote, that in mental illness “there is a sense of loosely hanging together, not hanging together at all, of not owning your body or thoughts. You lose a sense of being able to predict what you are about.”

“I’ve carried my mom on my back for decades, like a chant.” She worried that if she didn’t change her way of living, her second daughter would become estranged. “History is going to repeat itself,” she said.

The “desire to regain one’s mother is in reality the desire to regain the self,” Ramana has said. “This is surrender unto the mother, so she may live eternally.”

“I am mad with love, and no one sees,” Mirabai wrote. “Anguish takes me from door to door, but no doctor answers.”

“Oppressed/depressed—either way, you can’t feel good about yourself,” she said.

Mental-health institutions were not designed to address the kinds of ailments that arise from being marginalized or oppressed for generations.

For people of color, the risk of psychosis rises the whiter their community is.