March Narrative Medicine Rounds with Rachel Aviv

For our March rounds we welcomed back Rachel Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and author of the recent book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us. Named one of The New York Times' ten best books of the year, this "intimate and revelatory" book explores the stories of a handful of people, including Aviv herself, with complicated histories involving psychiatric illnesses. In her characteristic understated and nuanced style, according to The New York Times, Aviv "recognize(s) the multiplicity of stories that attach to her subjects’ experiences, exploring a variety of interpretations instead of jumping at the impulse to explain them away." Aviv spoke to us about her book and about the conversation(s) that it has begun. 

Rachel Aviv joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2013. She has written for the magazine about a range of subjects, including medical ethics, psychiatry, criminal justice, and education. She was twice a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Public Interest, and in 2022 she won a National Magazine Award for Profile Writing. Aviv was a recipient of the Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for her 2022 book “Strangers to Ourselves,” which The New York Times named one of the ten best books of the year. 

Narrative Medicine Rounds are monthly rounds on the first Wednesday of the month during the academic year hosted by the Division of Narrative Medicine in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Rounds are supported by live captioning. If you have any other accessibility needs or concerns, please contact the Office of Disability Services at 212-854-2388 or disability@columbia.edu at least 10 days in advance of the event. We will do our best to arrange accommodations received after this deadline but cannot guarantee them. A recording of our Virtual Narrative Medicine rounds will be made available following the live session on the Narrative Medicine YouTube channel, and you can watch other recent Rounds events there.