Strangers to Ourselves

The highly anticipated debut from the award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our deepest sense of who we are.

There are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which...

Strangers to Ourselves shares the experiences of five people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. It asks, do the stories we tell around mental illness affect its course, its outcomes, even our identities?

Drawing on in-depth reporting, written testimonies and formative events in her own childhood, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a subtle, compassionate, revelatory account of how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress.