The most striking of these profiles is of Naomi Gaines.In 2003, when she was a 24-year-old mother of four, she jumped off a bridge into the Mississippi river with her young twin boys, one of whom drowned.Her problems, as a poor black woman, started young.She grew up in a sprawling public-housing complex in Chicago that was partly controlled by gangs.Her mother had an abusive boyfriend and the pair took drugs.Mental illness was never discussed, her mother tells Ms Aviv.“In our family, if you feel a little down you just take a nap.That’s the solution: take a nap.”Ms Gaines moved in and out of hospital before her leap from the bridge.But the litany of diagnostic labels she was given was alienating, and she did not take her medication.“Where is the sensitive side of psychiatry?” she asked.After the jump she was committed to a secure institution as “mentally ill and dangerous” and started to take an antipsychotic.She was charged with second-degree murder and sent to prison.Things began to change: she read voraciously and became the prison’s library clerk.She was assigned a therapist.But in 2010 she was taken off the antipsychotic “due to cost”, and was soon put in solitary confinement for 60 days.She was released 16 years after her crime.Ms Aviv writes sensitively about the limits of diagnosis in a case like this one.
