From all the medical fields, the one dealing with mental health issues is fascinating for me. If in the case of most of the other medical fields, a simple blood test or an MRT can eventually lead to a clear diagnosis, the mental health prognosis and overview is based exclusively on stories. Short description of symptoms occurs in all the other medical fields, but in no other but neurology/psychology is the diagnosis depending on such a great extent on the patient´s own feedback and insights.
For more or less personal reasons, I am interested in new takes on mental health, specifically outlining the scientific challenges on one side, and the personal struggles of the patient on the other side.
The New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv´s Strangers to Ourselves. Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us has in this respect a both humble and creative. The book includes both insights about defining different mental illnesses - herself was hospitalized at 6 with an assumed anorexia nervosa, a diagnosis unheard of at this age - as well as medications and their ´magic´ power on our brains.
The categories of mental illness are extremely important in both the medication and the therapy strategies. A dear friend of mine is struggling for years with different diagnosis switched from a therapist to another, involving sudden switches of medication and therefore, extremely disturbing existential threats.
In the book, Aviv, although avoids from giving medical insights or to outline different theoretical takes, it brings the issue of mental health into a larger social, historical and linguistic as well approaches. Using the skills of an investigative journalist, still dealing in a very humble, humanly considerate way, it creates awareness and opens new fields of understanding and further understanding of this very sensitive topic.
Rating: 5 stars
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