Rachel Aviv is a journalist from New Yorker. She is also a woman who suffered from anorexia at the age of six. At six years old? Yes, at six years old, from one day to the next, he stopped eating. She wasn’t looking for information about thin bodies or knowing what girls with eating disorders talked about until she was admitted. I didn’t know because I was only six years old.
The psychologist assigned to him explained to his parents that the medical team had no record of any child of that age having been diagnosed with anorexia. The young women with whom she shared income considered her as a kind of “pet”, an anorexic in training. They talked about their weight in grams while Rachel barely knew what a scale was.
“I had one thing that was a fermeda what is yama annexea”, he recorded in his diary when he was still learning to write, in second grade. And he added: “Uve annexea because he wanted to be someone better than me.”
If one had to look for something similar to an explanation for his disorder, it could be found in the separation of his parents. After interviewing them, the doctor noted in his report that the mother had stated that the father made fun of obese people and that he had not denied it.
The experience she suffered at such a young age helps to understand why this journalist specialized in information related to health and education and why she has written a book that, based on real cases like hers, places medicine but also society before an uncomfortable mirror, that of inequalities, precariousness or racism.
Of the different stories that Rachel Aviv tells in (We are) strangers to ourselves (Lunwerg editorial) probably the most shocking is that of Naomi Gaines, a young woman who on July 4, 2003, after a walk with two of her young children during the annual Taste of Minnesota party, climbed onto the sidewalk From a bridge overlooking the Mississippi River, he walked a little, picked up the two children, one by one, kissed them and let them go. He then climbed the railing and jumped while shouting “freedom.” A man managed to save one of the creatures and the mother.
Before reaching that moment, this black woman was looking in the crowd for someone like her. But I only saw white families. I was sick although I didn’t know it or didn’t want to admit it. And because she was sick, she began to wonder if the fact that there were no more women like her meant that there were no more, that the rest had been annihilated. “She felt that she and her children had two options: a merciful death or one full of suffering,” says the author after reconstructing the case.
Naomi Gaines’ story did not begin on that bridge. He grew up in some buildings in Chicago, 28 identical blocks, one of the largest social housing projects in the United States. “The world considers all of us public housing rats, who live on a reservation, as if we were untouchable,” one of its first residents told a local newspaper.
Gaines grew up in that “hellhole” (as an agent from the Chicago Planning Authority defined it). I only left the building to go to school. 99% of the residents were black and 96% were unemployed. The neighbors explained that to survive you had to “be crazy or saturated with chemicals.” His sister ended up in a foster family. She wasn’t so lucky. She knew what it was like to escape in the middle of the night, fleeing from the couple who mistreated her mother and who insulted her at her new school by calling her “Midnight Black.” Almost all of her classmates were also black, but they laughed at her because she had darker skin than most of them.
This young woman began reading about the history of black women. “I was looking for… I don’t know… some continuity; get rid of loneliness”, he would explain some time later. She added that she wanted to know about people who felt the same way she did. The same penalty. The suicide attempt came and at the hospital he was diagnosed with “adjustment disorder.” That’s all. By then she was already a single mother with two children. “She believes her depression is due to ‘all the hate in the world’ and her discouragement from discrimination,” one social worker wrote in the report.
With an antidepressant they returned her home. After two weeks he stopped taking it. He said that the world made him anxious and that this could not be resolved with sertraline. No one followed up on his condition while his family simply prayed for him to get better.
Some time later she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but she refused to accept that she was ill. After throwing his children into the river, going to the hospital and entering a cell, his situation did not improve. She ran naked through the prison so that the rest of the inmates could see her “motherhood scars.” Finally, she was transferred to a psychiatric facility. She didn’t want to and was labeled “dangerous mentally ill.” Thanks to the drugs he understood why he was there. For the first time he was aware of who he was and what he had done. “The person who is here today would never have hurt his children,” he acknowledged.
He accepted a plea deal that included 18 years in prison and four years of supervised release. He worked in the library and collected quotes that he wrote down on a board. One of his favorites was this: “Prisons don’t make problems go away; They make human beings disappear.”
16 years later it came out. Once out, the medicines have allowed him not only to remain stable but also to help other people with mental illnesses. But the risk of relapse is still there and although he has paid his debt to society, he knows that he will spend “his entire life” without paying off what he owes his family.
The author cites Frantz Fanon, a psychiatrist and philosopher born in Martinique, who argued that mental health treatments would have to be practiced with “a brutal awareness of social and economic realities.” Testimonies like that of Naomi Gaines and many other unknown people prove him right.
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