"The label makes as little sense to me now as it did then. My distress hadn’t been precipitated by any particular event — there had been no parental divorce, no death in the family, no abuse or trauma. There wasn’t even a “before” from which to contrast this supposedly recent “after” — my whole life, or as much of it as I could remember, had been punctuated by mood swings, uncontrollably anxiety, depressive spells, and panic attacks. I never brought up the subject of diagnosis again with Dorothy; in fact, for the rest of my time at the Youth and Family Services office, I stopped asking questions altogether.⁠ ⁠ I thought of Dorothy for the first time in many years while reading an early copy of Rachel Aviv’s debut nonfiction book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us, which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish next week. Strangers to Ourselves is a suite of six psychiatric patient case studies whose subjects differ in age, race, religion, and economic background. Two things unite them: first, they have each left behind extensive journals or memoirs, allowing Aviv to meticulously reconstruct scenes from their lives; second, they each belong to what she terms the “psychic hinterlands,” realms of experience that prod against contemporary assumptions about mental illness and its treatment." ⁠ ⁠ R.E. Hawley reflects on psychiatric diagnosis and Rachel Aviv's Strangers to Ourselves, out next week from @fsgbooks. Read the whole thing at the link in bio.