Rachel Aviv was just six when she stopped eating and drinking. She is unable to recall why and her medical records paint an unclear picture, offering psychological assessments that might apply to almost anyone. Nevertheless, she found herself admitted to an anorexia unit, where she was denied contact with her family until she began eating again. After almost two weeks she managed breakfast, then lunch. Once her parents were allowed to visit “it was as if the spell had been broken,” she recounts.
Was she truly anorexic at such a young age? Now a staff writer at the New Yorker, Aviv has her doubts. Prior to being admitted to hospital, she had never encountered the word; to her child’s ears, it sounded like a species of dinosaur and yet seemed to hold such power, she was afraid to say it.
That early apprehension fuels a conviction at the heart of her first book, a subtle and penetrating investigation into how mental illness is diagnosed, and the ways in which the language used — far from neutral — molds a patient’s innermost self, promising to explain who they are by weaving narratives that free and entrap.
Framed by Aviv’s personal experience, Strangers to Ourselves profiles five “unsettled minds,” each embedded in a different political and cultural moment. Among them is Naomi, a black single mother from Minnesota who was convicted of murder after jumping into the Mississippi with her infant twins, certain that racist killers were hunting her, and Hava, an older girl from the anorexia clinic whom Aviv came to idolize during her brief stay there and whose life would take a course at once sadly predictable and surprising.
Aviv is an instinctive storyteller and her book’s episodic, immersive format is underpinned by in-depth reporting as she tracks down those closest to her subjects. It drives home her view that “our illnesses are not just contained in our skull but are also made and sustained by our relationships and communities.”
Woven throughout is an intimate examination of the roles that injustice and inequality play in mental distress and of the evolution and limitations of modern psychiatric practice. When a charismatic physician named Ray sought help for his depression in 1979, for instance, psychoanalysis still held sway. Ray wound up suing an elite hospital famed for its commitment to the talking cure, triggering a legal showdown between two competing approaches to mental illness: the Freudian and the pharmaceutical.
Pills won and by the 1990s, depression was widely held to be the result of a chemical imbalance, a view that has only recently begun to be challenged. It certainly dominated when Harvard freshman Laura started feeling as if she were trapped in the life of a stranger and was diagnosed with a bipolar disorder. Her search for a cure led her to take 19 different kinds of medication over the course of 14 years. (While black women such as Naomi tend to be undermedicated for depression in America, white women, especially “ambitious” ones, are often overmedicated.)
As Aviv explains, it was the Ayurvedic use of the plant Rauwolfia serpentina that gave rise to antidepressants — a fact generally written out of the history of psychiatry — and it’s to India that she turns for another case study: a Brahmin housewife named Bapu who retreated from a toxic relationship with her in-laws into Hindu mysticism, embracing “madness” (Bapu’s own word) as a sign of devotion. Her family, meanwhile, had her diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Though they unfold in diverse eras and cultures, these stories share a setting, Aviv observes: “The psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail.”
That hasn’t stopped her subjects from trying to find the right words and she’s been able to draw on their letters and unpublished memoirs, their blogs and poetry.
Her own language is meticulous, empathic, tirelessly inquisitive. Despite — or perhaps because of — her rigor, she also dares to acknowledge facets of identity that elude any theories of the mind currently available to us and to engage with profound mystery in the form of hauntings and religious mysticism.
Into this unexplained category falls an eerie voice she heard in hospital as a six-year-old.
“I sometimes think of that voice as a potential entry into a different realm of experience, an alternative path that for reasons I don’t fully understand I never took,” she says.
It’s this glimpse of a path untaken that infuses her approach to mental illness with such humility and kinship and her complex, illuminating book is all the stronger for it.
The primaries for this year’s nine-in-one local elections in November began early in this election cycle, starting last autumn. The local press has been full of tales of intrigue, betrayal, infighting and drama going back to the summer of 2024. This is not widely covered in the English-language press, and the nine-in-one elections are not well understood. The nine-in-one elections refer to the nine levels of local governments that go to the ballot, from the neighborhood and village borough chief level on up to the city mayor and county commissioner level. The main focus is on the 22 special municipality
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) invaded Vietnam in 1979, following a year of increasingly tense relations between the two states. Beijing viewed Vietnam’s close relations with Soviet Russia as a threat. One of the pretexts it used was the alleged mistreatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam. Tension between the ethnic Chinese and governments in Vietnam had been ongoing for decades. The French used to play off the Vietnamese against the Chinese as a divide-and-rule strategy. The Saigon government in 1956 compelled all Vietnam-born Chinese to adopt Vietnamese citizenship. It also banned them from 11 trades they had previously
In the 2010s, the Communist Party of China (CCP) began cracking down on Christian churches. Media reports said at the time that various versions of Protestant Christianity were likely the fastest growing religions in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The crackdown was part of a campaign that in turn was part of a larger movement to bring religion under party control. For the Protestant churches, “the government’s aim has been to force all churches into the state-controlled organization,” according to a 2023 article in Christianity Today. That piece was centered on Wang Yi (王怡), the fiery, charismatic pastor of the
Hsu Pu-liao (許不了) never lived to see the premiere of his most successful film, The Clown and the Swan (小丑與天鵝, 1985). The movie, which starred Hsu, the “Taiwanese Charlie Chaplin,” outgrossed Jackie Chan’s Heart of Dragon (龍的心), earning NT$9.2 million at the local box office. Forty years after its premiere, the film has become the Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute’s (TFAI) 100th restoration. “It is the only one of Hsu’s films whose original negative survived,” says director Kevin Chu (朱延平), one of Taiwan’s most commercially successful
RSS