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

by Rachel Aviv

A common theme on the forums was that people felt that at some point, having taken numerous medications for years, they’d become disabled, and they were no longer sure if it was due to their underlying disorder, the heavy medications they’d taken for it, or the way their families or communities had responded to them—a process that sometimes coincided with the pressure of needing to prove their disability, in order to receive social security benefits. Swapnil Gupta, a professor at the Yale School of Medicine, told me that when her patients express fear about stopping their medications, their concerns are often about social and financial problems as much as about medical ones. “Some people worry they will lose their disability payments because being on lots of meds has become a badge of illness,” she said. For others, “the pills represent an attachment to a physician, and taking away that medication means they are losing that attachment.” She went on, “It is a loss of identity, a different way of living: suddenly everything that you are doing is yours, and not necessarily your medication.”