Fiona’s Reviews > Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us > Status Update

"In another essay, comparing herself to a friend who was paralyzed from the neck down, Deegan writes, “Recovery does not refer to an end product or result. It does not mean that the paralyzed man and I were ‘cured.’ In fact, our recovery is marked by an ever-deepening acceptance of our limitations.” She proposes that “transformation rather than restoration becomes our path.”

"She had discovered that 'real loneliness,' as Fromm-Reichmann writes, is 'potentially a communicable experience, one which can be shared.'"

"But that question—'Am I the insane one, or is it society?'—diminishes the reality of mental disability and presumes the impossible: that the self can be divorced from the society that shapes it."