Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stores that Make Us by Rachel Aviv
Some time ago, I read a review in the NYT of a memoir written by a woman who went off all her psychiatric medications, and she'd been on a lot of them for a very long time so this was significant. I couldn't remember the author's name, the book's title, nor could I re-find the review after searching in the app. I bought "Strangers to Ourselves" hoping it might be the book I read about in the review and while it wasn't, it does feature the story of Laura Delano (author of the book I was trying to find) and is an insightful, moving book I'm grateful to have bought (sort of) by mistake. "Strangers to Ourselves" includes stories of the author and five others who faced life-altering mental health diagnoses. Some recovered, some did not. Some sought care in traditional psychiatric facilities and leaned on evidenced-based modalities and some did not. "Strangers to Ourselves" demonstrates that a diagnosis is really just a story, perhaps ev...