STRANGERS TO OURSELVES Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us By Rachel Aviv

I just read this book and it was so compelling...

There’s Ray, who sued an elite psychiatric hospital that prided itself on its psychoanalytic approach for failing to make him better; Bapu, a wealthy Brahmin mother of two who repeatedly left her family in Chennai, India, to pursue the ascetic life of a mystic; Naomi, who was incarcerated for second-degree murder after throwing herself and her twin babies into the Mississippi River; and Laura, a Harvard graduate from a well-to-do family, who had been prescribed psychiatric medications since she was a teenager and decided — years later — to see who she was without the drugs.

We learn about these people one by one, with a chapter for each, so that Aviv can recount their lives in detail and therefore in full. She interviews doctors, friends and survivors; she reads her subjects’ journals in order to get a grasp on how they explained themselves to themselves. Aside from her candid reflections in the prologue and the epilogue, Aviv mostly hangs back, even though her own experience primes us — as maybe it primed her — to be alert to how stories can clarify as well as distort the mental distress that a person is going through.

 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/07/books/rachel-aviv-strangers-to-ourselves.html