I FINISHED THIS months ago but have been daunted by the prospect of writing about it. It's more interesting than anything I can say about it, that's certain--it bids fair to become a contemporary classic, I think.
Framed by a prologue about Aviv's own brush--at age six!--with professional mental health treatment and an epilogue about what became of a somewhat older girl whom she met while in treatment, Strangers to Ourselves offers four portraits of individuals for whom, at different times and in different places, mental health treatment became the dominant fact of their existence.
The first, Ray, was in an institution in the 1980s, right at the time when psychoanalytical approaches were only starting to give way to pharmaceutical ones, and the doctors treating him did not want to try drugs; the fourth, Laura, in treatment in the 2010s, was medicated to a fare-thee-well from a young age and now wonders if it was too much.
Between those two ironically complementary cases, we have a woman in India whose circumstances looked like divine madness to some of her neighbors, and a woman who, in an act like the historical Margaret Garner or Morrison's fictional Sethe, tried to drown her children to save them from what she feared was an even worse fate.
The quick summation of the book would be that there are quite a few ways to explain mental illness, none of which seems completely adequate, and navigation among the explanations is not the lightest of the burdens of being mentally ill.
As is the case with any really good book, though, the quick summation is only the tip of the iceberg and gives no true idea of what an absorbing experience the reading of it is, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.
You and I may never sail to the strange shores these profiles describe, but Aviv helps us see those shores are not so far away from any of us as we suppose.
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