Strangers to Ourselves by Rachel Aviv

Author:Rachel Aviv
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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After being rescued from the Mississippi River, it took Naomi several weeks to grasp the reality of what she had done. She spent three days in the hospital recovering from her fall before being sent to the Ramsey County Jail, which overlooked the Mississippi River. Naomi was placed in a cell that happened to have a view of the bridge. She interpreted her cell number, which was 316, as a sign that she was God. The New Testament verse John 3:16 reads, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son.”

She asked a guard for a pencil and drafted a letter. “To whom it may concern,” she wrote. “If we looked at our communities as a tree, where would the ‘root’ be, or better yet, who would the ‘root’ be? Mothers would be the beginning.” She went on, “But the surface cannot maintain, it cannot be strong and stand if the ‘foundation’ is damaged.”

A few days later, she stripped naked and ran through the halls of the jail. She wanted people to “see my scars,” she told a doctor. “The pain of motherhood.” A social worker wrote that she was “vacillating between total catatonic behavior to a primal scream.” Her behavior seemed to embody the principle that Karl Jaspers applied to people who had fallen out of the realm of shared human understanding—the “doctrine of the abyss.”

After a month, Naomi was transferred to the Minnesota Security Hospital, the state’s largest psychiatric institute, where she was civilly committed as “mentally ill and dangerous.” A doctor wrote, “Her insight is nonexistent.” A judge ordered that she be forcibly medicated.

Naomi took the antipsychotic Geodon, along with the mood stabilizer Depakote. After a few weeks, she told her mom on the phone, “When I take these medications, I’m not scared that people are worming their way into my life so they can hurt me.” The drugs gave her clarity about why she was in the hospital. She spent days in bed weeping. When a nurse asked Naomi how she was doing, she responded, crying, “I don’t know how spiritual you are, but I hope my baby don’t hate me.” She told the nurse, “The person here today would never have harmed her children.”

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