by Rachel Aviv
First published 2022
Rachel Aviv investigates how psychiatric diagnoses shape identity by following four individuals who question medical explanations of their conditions. She reports on an Indian woman living in Kerala healing temples who is revered as a saint, an imprisoned mother working to regain her children's trust after experiencing psychosis, a man who spends years pursuing vengeance against his former psychoanalysts, and a wealthy young woman who stops taking medication after ten years because she wants to discover her identity beyond her diagnosis. Aviv combines original reporting with unpublished personal writings from her subjects. She weaves her own experience into the narrative, recounting her time as a six-year-old patient in a psychiatric ward where she befriended another child whose path eventually diverged from her own. The book examines how the narratives we create around mental illness influence their development in our lives and questions conventional approaches to understanding psychological distress.
Genres: psychology, mental-health, social-issues, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: unreliable-narrator
Setting: Kerala, India
276 pages · Hardcover · Harvill Secker
Content warnings: mental-illness