Rachel Aviv is Thinking (and Writing) about Our Mental Health

Thinking through ideas takes time and attention. If you’re reading this on a phone, while doing something else, chances are high that you will not finish this. To even begin reading something may been a difficult choice. We are flooded with options. Headlines Compete Furiously For Our Attention!

But here you are…reading the beginning. Like Rachel Aviv, you’re curious about thinking, too.

This morning, on my one-day-a-week commute across the Bay Bridge to my teaching job in Daly City, I listened to a fascinating interview with journalist Rachel Aviv. A frequent contributor to the The New Yorker, Aviv’s first book is out. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us is about mental health and our internal narratives. I’ve always been interested in internal narratives, mental health and therapy…probably because I’ve struggled with a loud internal critic and have a vivid imagination. Being self-conscious is useful for creativity and grappling with identity…and less useful for teenagers…who are almost universally struggling with identity formation.

I’ve been talking to therapists for nearly twenty years — longer if you include my high school guidance counselor, who might have named the creaky wooden chair opposite his desk “Jonah’s Chair!” during my sophomore year of high school. Despite, or maybe because of, talk therapy, I have never been on medication. My experiences with big pharma are with the less catastrophic pills…you know, your…