Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us

Peter Kramer, the author of Listening to Prozac, told me that the SSRIs were “eerily consonant with what the culture required of women: less fragility, more juggling outside of the home.”

Another woman incarcerated there told Naomi, “You don’t read for you—you read for other people.” Naomi said, “I loved that comment. It is not everybody’s passion to read books, but I damn sure can disperse the information to whoever is listening.”

Deegan writes, “Recovery does not refer to an end product or result. It does not mean that the paralyzed man and I were ‘cured.’ In fact, our recovery is marked by an ever-deepening acceptance of our limitations.” She proposes that “transformation rather than restoration becomes our path.”

Dorian Deshauer, a psychiatrist and historian at the University of Toronto, told me, “Once you abandon the idea of the personal baseline, it becomes possible to think of emotional suffering as relapse—instead of something to be expected from an individual’s way of being in the world.”

Studies show that people who see mental illness as biological or genetic are less likely to blame mental conditions on weak character or to respond in punitive ways, but they are more likely to see a person’s illness as out of her control, alienating, and dangerous.

The surgeon general’s first-ever report on mental health, in 1999, proposed that stigma arises from “the misguided split between mind and body first proposed by Descartes.” At a press conference, the surgeon general announced that there is “no scientific justification for distinguishing between mental illness and other forms of illness.”

Helena Hansen, a psychiatrist and an anthropologist at UCLA who studies racial stereotypes in medicine, told me, “It is woven into the fabric of this country that Black women’s role is to do the work, to do the suffering, so why would we—the mainstream mental-health field—be chasing them down and asking, ‘Can I treat you for your sadness?’”