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Culture
文化板块
Book review: Mental health
书评：心理健康
The pill machine
药片机
Dispatches from the struggle to diagnose and treat mental illness
与诊断并治疗精神疾病作斗争
Strangers to Ourselves. By Rachel Aviv.
《陌生的自己》瑞秋·艾薇芙著
What if the diagnosis of a mental illness does not help a patient?
如果精神疾病的诊断对患者没有帮助怎么办？
What if it traps them into a system—therapeutic or pharmaceutical—which, paradoxically, makes them worse?
如果诊断会把他们困在治疗或药物系统中，结果反而让他们更严重呢？
Rachel Aviv, a writer for the New Yorker, poses these questions at the start of “Strangers to Ourselves”, a collection of essays loosely strung together by the theme of “unsettled minds”.
瑞秋·艾薇芙是《纽约客》的一名作家，她在《陌生的自己》的开头提出了这些问题，这是一本以“不安的心灵”为主题的杂文集。
“Strangers to Ourselves” is book-ended by Ms Aviv’s own psychological struggles.
《陌生的自己》以艾薇芙自己的心理斗争为结尾。
She begins by recalling her hospitalisation for anorexia when she was six.
她首先回忆了自己六岁时因厌食症住院的经历。
At that age the diagnosis was too big for her to comprehend, just as the name of the illness was hard to spell: “I had some thing that was a siknis its cald anexorea.”
在那个年纪，这个诊断结果对她来说太难懂了，就像这个病名的写法一样难，所以她写道：“我得了一种交（叫）做厌石（食）症的并（病）。”
On the ward, she learnt to imitate the tics and mannerisms of the older girls.
在病房里，她学会了模仿比她大的女孩的抽搐和各种动作。
Shocked at how she and her condition were typecast, her parents rejected the doctors’ advice that she should be put into a further psychiatric hospital—which may have saved her from a life defined by the disorder.
她的父母对她和她的病情毫无改善感到震惊，他们拒绝了医生提出送她到更远的精神病院的建议--这可能把她从被这种疾病定义的生活中拯救了出来。
Near the end of her book, Ms Aviv writes about how, as a journalist in New York, she was put on an antidepressant.
在书的最后，艾薇芙写道，作为纽约的一名报纸撰稿人，她服用了一种抗抑郁药物。
“My first six months on Lexapro were probably the best half-year of my life.”
“我服用来士普的前六个月可能是我一生中状态最好的时光。”
Her anxieties about her work lifted; she got engaged and, later, became pregnant.
她对工作的焦虑减轻了；她订了婚，后来还怀孕了。
But when she tried to give up the drug, she found that she slumped into depression.
但当她试图停药时，她发现自己立刻患上了抑郁。
She has now been on it for more than a decade.
她现在已经服用这个药十多年了。
Between these personal experiences, Ms Aviv profiles five people who have wrestled with psychological problems and written about their experiences in unpublished memoirs, diaries and fragments.
在这些个人经历中，艾薇芙穿插描述了五个人，他们都与心理问题作斗争，并将自身的经历写在了未出版的回忆录、日记和短文中。
Through these case studies, she questions the efficacy of different kinds of treatments and the parameters of clinical thinking, particularly in America, where a pill-based approach tends to dominate.
通过研究这些案例，她对不同治疗方法的有效性和临床思维的参数提出了质疑，尤其对美国的这些方面提出质疑，因为在美国，基于药物的治疗方法往往占主导地位。
One in eight Americans takes antidepressants; among white women, that rises to one in five.
八分之一的美国人都会服用抗抑郁药物；而白人女性的比例高至五分之一。
But the plights of black and poor people are often ignored.
但黑人和穷人的困境往往被忽视。
More than two-thirds of women incarcerated in prisons have a history of mental illness.
被关押在监狱中的女性中，三分之二以上有精神病史。
译文由可可原创，仅供学习交流使用，未经许可请勿转载。
