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

by Rachel Aviv

“There was a moment at the beginning of psychopharmacology when there was an attempt to create a capacious perspective—to study the lived world of the suffering individual, and the way psychopharmacology changed it—but mainstream medicine in America cut out that perspective. And the cutting out of that perspective was presented as scientific progress.”

“To make a person look at himself when he’s in no condition to do so,” Ayd said, “can be a very dangerous thing to do.”

“For the soul that has found god there is no gender,” she wrote in her journal.