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There, the girl was admitted for failure to eat and, soon after, diagnosed with anorexia nervosa.
She was, at the time, the countrys youngest known eating-disorder patient.
After six weeks, the girl was discharged and, by the following spring, deemed cured.
I had some thing that was a siknis its cald aneroxia, she wrote in her diary soon after.
I had anexorea because I want to be someone better than me.
Aviv is now aNew Yorkerstaff writer, frequently covering difficult subjects ranging from mental health to criminal justice.
He wrote largely from a diagnostic perspective.
so you can do so, Aviv draws from a range of literary texts.
ThroughoutStrangers to Ourselves, writing often seems to be both symptom and cure.
Rays case became one of the most prominent psychiatric-malpractice lawsuits of the 20th century.
All the while, he was writing his own version.
As that title suggests, Rays desire to reclaim control expressed itself through a kind of logorrhea.
I have become a historic figure, he writes.
I am the man that everyone knows about but no one knows.
Two different stories about his illness, the psychoanalytic and the neurobiological, had failed him, explains Aviv.
Not unlike Rays, Bapus story illustrates a limit to the models of western psychiatry.
They resist inherited scripts, even at the risk of further alienation.
And Aviv herself is ultimately more interested in character-driven storytelling than in large-scale structural critique.
Aviv is a recessive presence here so precise and impersonal that some sections risk becoming boring.
Am I not this?
goes the subtitle to one chapter.
Avivs journalistic voice is deft, and she moves with a light touch.
