Rachel Aviv Quotes

It's startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.

Culture shapes the scripts that expressions of distress will follow.

The philosopher Ian Hacking uses the term “looping effect” to describe the way that people get caught in self-fulfilling stories about illness. A new diagnosis can change “the space of possibilities for personhood,” he writes. “We make ourselves in our own scientific image of the kinds of people it is possible to be.

The divide between the psychic hinterlands and a setting we might call normal is permeable, a fact that I find both haunting and promising. It’s startling to realize how narrowly we avoid, or miss, living radically different lives.

People can feel freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.

I’m doing better now. I’m assimilating into what I’d like to think is a normal existence. And I don’t want contact with the prior life. You make me vulnerable.

Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially in the beginning, can shape their course. People can feel freed by these stories, but they can also get stuck in them.

Mental illnesses are often seen as chronic and intractable forces that take over our lives, but I wonder how much the stories we tell about them, especially in the beginning, can shape their course.

None of this is tragic. You are not heroic enough to be tragic.

each person that was doing well was attributing their newfound life to God.” They were able to move on, it seemed, because they had reoriented their lives around a new story.

Fromm-Reichmann described loneliness as “one of the least satisfactorily conceptualized psychological phenomena, not even mentioned in most psychiatric textbooks”—a state in which the “fact that there were people in one’s past life is more or less forgotten, and the possibility that there may be interpersonal relationships in one’s future life is out of the realm of expectation.” Loneliness was such a deep threat, she wrote, that psychiatrists avoided talking about it, because they feared they’d be contaminated by it, too. The experience was nearly impossible to communicate; it was a kind of “naked existence.

But Patel, the Harvard professor of global health, believes that the WHO studies do not sufficiently account for the high mortality rates of people with mental illness in developing countries, as well as the abuse and discrimination they face. He worries that this omission promotes a naive and “extremely Northern perspective about the enlightened native”—a modern reprise of the colonial myth that those who haven’t been exposed to civilization are innocent and happy.

On cloudless mornings, when she is gardening, she is sometimes seized by the desire to “leave everything and go away,” she told me. She doesn’t want to see a computer or stove. She feels she has too many clothes and wants to give them to others. One morning, she was on her terrace and felt herself melting. “I had an immense urge to jump off and mingle with the sky,” she said. “It is a very expansive, loving feeling. In that space, you can allow anything to come in and occupy you. The only thought that finally drew me back was: I have a daughter. And I am not going to do to her what my mom did.

Naomi wondered if the twins had been implanted into her womb by some sinister, external force. “This is unnatural,” Naomi wrote. “Babies shouldn’t be born in this fashion, so far removed from anything human.” When Khalid held the twins up for Naomi to see, she looked away. She was reminded of a friend’s dog who had to be put under during labor. When the dog woke up after a C-section, she appeared not to understand why these foreign puppies were sniffing her body as if they were entitled to it.

The garment that we call ‘this body’ has come to one person as a child, to another as a wife, to another as a mother, to another as an enemy, and to some as a friend, and it perishes entirely,” she wrote. “Why be sad about it! It’s the fate of the world.

There was a moment at the beginning of psychopharmacology when there was an attempt to create a capacious perspective—to study the lived world of the suffering individual, and the way psychopharmacology changed it—but mainstream medicine in America cut out that perspective. And the cutting out of that perspective was presented as scientific progress.

To make a person look at himself when he’s in no condition to do so,” Ayd said, “can be a very dangerous thing to do.

the twentieth century’s dominant explanations for mental distress—the psychodynamic and the biochemical.

But devotion can also help you feel a deep connection to this fact: I didn't ask for this life, so whatever I have is a bonus.

simulacrum.

I would say to myself, ‘I am living, but I am not alive.

For a child, solipsistic by nature, there are limits to the ways that despair can be communicated. Culture shapes the scripts that expressions of distress will follow. In both anorexia and resignation syndrome, children embody anger and a sense of powerlessness by refusing food, one of the few methods of protest available to them. Experts tell these children that they are behaving in a recognisable way that has a label. The children then make adjustments, conscious and unconscious, to the way that they've been classified. Over time, a willed pattern of behaviour becomes increasingly involuntary and ingrained.

a reference to Freud’s 1917 paper “Mourning and Melancholia.” In the essay, Freud had proposed that melancholia arises when a patient is mourning something or someone but “cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost.

I felt a little deflated upon realizing that David’s thumbnail sketch of my childhood was not particular to me. I was among a large class of girls finding the same misguided solution to roughly the same type of tensions, often in similar social settings.

Anorexia is the most fatal of all mental illnesses, but insurance companies tend to consider anorexics “the ‘wrong’ kind of sick,” writes the anthropologist Rebecca Lester.

According to one survey, 97 percent of eating-disorder specialists said that their patients had been put in situations that threatened their lives, because their insurance wouldn’t pay for more care, and one in five specialists said that insurance companies were responsible for the death of a patient.

eating disorders continue to occupy a space in the popular imagination as a choice,” a sickness for which the sufferer bears responsibility.

THE POET LOUISE GLÜCK, who was anorexic, wrote, “The tragedy of anorexia seems to me that its intent is not self-destructive, though its outcome so often is. Its intent is to construct, in the only way possible when means are so limited, a plausible self.

بزرگترین ناامیدی آزادی فهمیدن این بود که چیز زیادی تغییر نکرده است. «همان امریکای قبلی است»

The French philosopher René Girard describes anorexia as being rooted in “the desire not to be a saint but to be regarded as one.” He writes, “There is great irony in the fact that the modern process of stamping out religion produces countless caricatures of it.