Showing results for "the stranger" in Mental Health

Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and riveting look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on unpublished journals and letters, along with deep reporting, it follows people who feel as if they have reached the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. Their diagnosis, while giving their experiences a name, also shapes their sense of what their future may look like—and their identities, too.

After decades of affluence, we’re busy renovating our homes, buffing and botoxing our bodies and losing ourselves in passive entertainment and shopping, as depression and anxiety soar. And with the arrival of Netflix and Uber Eats, there’s less and less incentive to leave home. Could our constant need for connection be messing with our brains? Is this why we’re losing our ability to strike up a conversation with anyone we don’t know? And given that so many of our kids lack one-on-one attention and regular touch, are we raising this new generation to be profoundly lonely?

As Roseann Sdoia waited to watch her friend cross the finish line of the Boston Marathon in 2013, she had no idea her life was about to change - that in a matter of minutes she would look up from the sidewalk, burned and deaf, staring at her detached foot, screaming for help amid the smoke and blood. In the chaos of the minutes that followed, three people would enter Roseann's life and change it forever.