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

by Rachel Aviv

“I needed to cry out, to confess, ‘You’re a big bag of hot wind. You’re a failure, admit it. That big fancy personality you think you have— it’s air.’”

Appreciate this hint of ego death

For adolescents who go on medications when they are still learning what it means to be their best self, they may never know if they have a baseline, or what it is. “It’s not so much a question of ‘Does the technology deliver?’” Deshauer said. “It’s a question of ‘What are we asking of it?’”

The risk for young people, and all people, is never knowing and/or fogettting a baseline emotional level. In general, the assertion here is that psychiatry Risks pathologizing strong negative emotion and emotional struggle

What can a psychiatrist say, Elliott asks, to “an alienated Sisyphus as he pushes the boulder up the mountain? That he would push the boulder more enthusiastically, more creatively, more insightfully, if he were on Prozac?”

“Let me guess: your mother was probably reasonably bright but frustrated, academically and intellectually. She wasn’t achieving what she’d hoped.” I agreed. “And your father was likely a professional sort, highly skilled and demanding.” “Right.” “And there was a tremendous amount of discord.” “How did you know?” I asked him. “It’s not an infrequent story,” he said. My mom had once told me that a doctor at Children’s Hospital had written a case study of me, and, though there is no published evidence of this, for a second I wondered if this text existed after all. I felt a little deflated upon realizing that David’s thumbnail sketch of my childhood was not particular to me.

This reductionist notion that some pathologies can be so textbook, especially compared to Laura's story where she changed her life to better match the stated pathology. Is one necessarily more right?