This is a brilliant young prize-winning American journalist, a staff writer for the New Yorker, asking important and subversive questions about the evolution, application and development of psychiatry. We place a great deal of trust in the medical system. But does a mental health diagnosis have the power to perpetuate, or even create, symptoms as its subject adapts to live within it? Is there another way of talking about their experience? And are patients being truly heard? In an attempt to answer these questions, Aviv has chosen four subjects who have the capacity to interrogate the theories and explanations they have been given for their own mental states-subjects who at some stage fundamentally reject psychiatry's explanatory framework, and see their own suffering through another lens-spirituality, loneliness, legitimate existential despair. Aviv believes that it is a writer's job to listen and imagine and so tell the stories that other disciplines may be missing. Alongside her subjects' stories she will write about the evolution of psychiatry, with particularly interesting and troubling reference to its imposition through colonial history. The deep universal question at the heart of all of her work is, what does it mean to be human? How far can we go to the edge of experience and emotion and still remain sane? And what happens to us-socially, culturally, medically, psychologically--when we step into the liminal spaces outside of 'ordinary life'?

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and deeply researched look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on conversations as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, it follows people who have found that psychiatric language has limitations when it comes to explaining who they are, or that a diagnosis, while giving their experience a name, creates a sense of a future life they wish to question or resist. Rachel Aviv is known for her radical empathy: she excels at seeing the world through the eyes of her fellow human beings. Writing first about her own experience of being institutionalized at the age of six, she introduces, among others, a mother recovering from psychosis and rebuilding her relationship with her children; a woman who lives in healing temples in Kerala, where she is celebrated as a saint; and a young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to stop her medication because she doesn't know who she is without it. Through startling connections, intimate testimonies and diverse cultural perspectives, Aviv opens up fresh ways of thinking about illness and the mind, in a book which is curious, transformative, and above all, profoundly human.