CBC Radio’s The Sunday Magazine is a lively, wide-ranging mix of topical long-form conversations, engaging ideas and more. Each week, host Piya Chattopadhyay takes time for deep exploration, but also makes space for surprise, delight and fun.
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How stories and labels shape our understanding of mental illness
17:51
The term mental illness does a lot of heavy lifting. It's broad, vague, and can mean different things to different people. Even more specific diagnoses like depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia can fail to tell the whole story of the person living with mental illness. In her debut book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, The New Yorker staff writer Rachel Aviv uses profiles of people in different places, eras and cultures to explore how psychiatric conditions live within and outside our bodies. She joins Piya Chattophadhay to talk about how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are.