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

by Rachel Aviv

Anorexia has often been described as a “reading disorder,”1 brought on by uncritical consumption of texts that present thinness as the feminine ideal. I was

The philosopher Miranda Fricker describes a species of inequality called “epistemic injustice,”53 which is a “wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.”

She was drawn to the discipline because it “insulated me from my inner emotions and self,” she said. She rejected her

In another paper, she called for a revival of the phenomenological tradition to which Roland Kuhn had belonged.58 “A ‘depressive’ does not just enact the symptoms,”59 she wrote. “She experiences the world differently. She uses

language differently. She experiences emotions differently.” By ignoring these sorts of experiences—the “unclassified residuum,” as William James called it—doctors risk misunderstanding why mental illness can be so isolating, altering people’s lives in ways that cannot be captured

They are, essentially, stories of haunted houses. There’s an idyllic setting and a happy family, and, eventually, the dawning

recognition of an intrusive force or unwanted inheritance. Shortly after I arrived at his house, Karthik drew a picture of his mother’s home, Amrita, on a page of my notebook. He marked the upper-right corner of the house with an X, surrounded

Saul Williams: “Our stars and stripes / Using blood-splattered banners as nationalist kites.”3

In Hope Draped in Black, the scholar Joseph R. Winters revisits Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” to describe what happens when Black people realize that an ideal, like freedom or equality, has been withheld from them. The loss becomes internalized, undermining “any notion of self-coherence,”31 Winters writes. “Melancholy registers

the experience of being rendered invisible, of being both assimilated into and excluded from the social order.”32

Barred from full recognition, the grief never resolves.33 “That’s what makes it all so hysterical, so unwieldy and so completely irretrievable,”34 James Baldwin said, using a similar ...

some great, great, great wound is in the whole body, and no one dares to operate: to close it, t...

In mental illness, the boundary between self and other often seems to erode, but pregnancy gives that confusion physical form. The philosopher Iris Marion Young describes pregnancy

as the “most extreme suspension of bodily distinction between inner and outer.”70 Describing the growing fetus,

Freeman’s defense attorney, William Seward, who later became Abraham

to oneself,”24 she wrote. In some sense being the perfect patient had been a form of avoidance, a way of attending to a narrow set of symptoms rather than to discontents about her social world—the goals for which she was supposed to be competing, the pristine persona she was expected to cultivate.

Once the chemical-imbalance theory became popular, mental health became synonymous with an absence of symptoms, rather than with a return to a person’s baseline, her mood or personality before and between periods of crisis.

While Black women tend to be undermedicated for depression, white women, especially ambitious ones, are often overmedicated, in order to “have it all”: a family and a thriving career. And

meet the requirements. And yet, at that moment, the subject suddenly became much more compelling. As I listened to audio recordings of interviews that at the time I had felt were going nowhere, I realized that these people had been saying fascinating things. It was as if previously I had been looking for something too constricted.

“These more and more seem like Make The Ambitious Ladies More Tolerable pills,”

of me (ones that even my boyfriend didn’t know about) were bursting out too loudly and sloppily and aggressively. Recently I asked Helen how she understood the source of our anxiety, and she wrote, “We are all ‘good girls’ in every sense of the word (but also, bad girls).” Anna, the friend who had recommended Dr. Hall, took

I am drawn to this idea, though I don’t think these two strategies are in opposition. I also realize that I’ve endowed my pill of choice with mystical capacities—it contains the things I’m not but wish I was—and merely the idea of swallowing such a thing has healing power. I wish I had a more flexible

“But once it goes beyond that period, it is tremendously upsetting for older people, in terms of their own anxieties. And then, at some magical point—I’m not sure you can define it—these children, instead of generating empathy, become uncomfortable freaks.”

“The tragedy of anorexia seems to me that its intent is not self-destructive, though its outcome so often is. Its intent is to construct, in the only way possible when means are so limited, a plausible self.”12