Scan barcode
just_one_more_paige's review
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
2.0
This is another example of a recent book (just like Big Swiss), that I would not have really been aware of, nor planned to pick up, without it being offered as an ALC from Libro.fm. But conceptually, after reading the blurb, I was really intrigued. It is clear to anyone paying attention that certain groups or types of people get the benefit of the doubt (in almost any situation) and some absolutely do not (and even more extreme, are facing an uphill battle from that start). And so, other than the clear cultural and social biases that must make up at least part of that, what else is happening that causes that unevenness is who is taken seriously? So yea, this was very much a topic that intrigued me. I wanted to know what Nayeri's research found.
In this book, Nayeri explores the power of performance, persuasion, repetition and how those affect what people perceive as truth or lies, and whose stories/testimonies gets believed or dismissed. She uses personal examples, such as a family member with mental illnesses and deep religious belief (including more "extreme" examples, like speaking in tongues), time spent in high-powered business world consulting jobs, and childbirth. And she weaves those in with interviews with others who work in emergency rooms, justice systems and, at the heart of it all: asylum seekers and those tasked with defending them (lawyers) and deciding on the "truth" of their lives. Throughout, there is also quite a bit of research, examination of language and psychology, and philosophical thought exercises that work to pull all the disparate stories and examples and situations together into a more cohesive presentation.
Before I say anything about the book itself, or my thoughts on it, I need to make sure everyone is aware of how many content warnings this should have come with. I mean, this jumps in *hard* right off the bat with graphic descriptions of torture, and they are referred back to consistently throughout. Also, as one goes through, there are many other instances of graphic descriptions of mental illness and suicide, pregnancy/childbirth (and in general interactions with medical staff), other forms of violence against populations and bodies (like FGM), wrongful convictions and failures of the justice system, and just generally there is no sugar coating the traumas of dealing with being a refugee whether it be in adjusting to a new place or the myriad legal/procedural barriers and disbelief that they face. So yea, this is definitely a book that readers should be very careful about and sure they are prepared for the content before picking it up.
Alright, so now for my thoughts. Overall, this book felt like too much. It felt like an overwhelming stream of consciousness connections between theory and philosophy and real life examples and family stories just barely woven together in a followable way. And the thing is, I get that people are complex and contain multitudes and all these thoughts and personal experiences and interviews and explorations may be both a part of Nayeri's life and somehow have gotten woven together for her, but this just may have tried to get too many of those multitudes into one book. All throughout, I was waiting to see if everything would build to a bigger point, and, though the message is obvious, it just never came together as coherently as I would have liked. There’s also a lot of repetition, conceptually and at a sentence-level, and I think this could use some more stringent editing. And really, there were a number of times when I couldn't tell what was legitimate data/science and what was her personal logic path and reasoning, which ironically made it hard to know what to give the most credence to.
I will say, and I think that this is key, that the overall concept of this book, the idea that there are certain types of stories, ways of telling those stories, and categories of people that are more "believable" - for reasons that have nothing to do with the truth and everything to do with how a person performs/presents - is an undeniable truth that absolutely needs to be reckoned with, because otherwise justice will never be done. It was infuriating to read how "proper" storytelling, and a learned/taught performance of credibility (a combination of poise and language choice and external look that lends credence regardless of the actual knowledge/truth of the person), holds more weight than truth in whether a person is believed. Nayeri presents a number of examples to prove this, across industry and situation, and provides research and poses myriad thought experiments to back up those claims. Some of what she discusses was not a surprise to me (like the absolute lack of training, or follow through on using training, in understanding how trauma survivors and memory work - only used when the person with power individually decides to give "benefit of the doubt," but not universally/evenly applied), but some of it did add fascinating context and nuance to my understanding (like the power of repetition - how many times something is said or printed - in making it believable, even when there is nothing factual behind it/backing it up). I use the word fascinating because the exploration of human psychology and sociology really was, but again, it was also deeply enraging to be shown over and over how the truth is not enough if the systems/society are against you. I mean, what then, is the point of those systems? What will it take to change them to do what they are supposed to be doing (protecting the vulnerable, the one's currently least believed)??
A few final thoughts. Although this was a (much) more serious book, I think there was some real overlap, topically, with Cultish. The way language and the power of words/personality can lead to buy-in, as well as a look at how the differences among self-convincing done to nefarious/self-benefitting ends or as a more legitimate self-denial, or is it something that happens when the truth is too much (too terrible, too coincidental) to feel real or the repetition of terrible things becomes too much to handle and one has to self-distance - there was a lot of similarity there that, if you can handle the increased intensity here, you may be interested in if you liked Cultish. And I thought the cross-industry comparisons brought up some really interesting parallels, like how the “right" way to tell a story or present a need to get the result one wants works similarly in situations as vastly different as asylum cases and chronic pain/drug seeking (or other medical situations related to mental health) and religious belief. I appreciated the way that Nayeri was so willing to recognize and call out her own limitations in belief, where she got cynical, and these psychological traps that she has fallen into. I really did. And. I really struggled reading her outlook on her brother-in-law’s mental health, the way it seemed that (despite all her knowledge and research in this area), she appeared to lack any kind of empathy or even willingness to try to consider it a real illness/problem.
I am having so much trouble trying to communicate my thoughts on this reading experience. The evidence presented is sweeping, convincing, and drives home a deeply important societal reality about believability as/achieved by performance. And at the same time, it felt so choppy, so thrown together. So, for all that it is ambitious and salient and necessary, it also isn't executed to the level that I would have liked or that would have had the desired impact. Plus, there’s never even an attempt to suggest ways to address/fix the issues that are being argued. And that's really really too bad. (Has anyone else read this? What did you think? Am I wrong? Did you want it to hit harder too? Does this review make you want to, or do you plan to, read this anyways? I want to discuss!)
"It’s hard to be objective from inside this feeble human mind."
“To be believed is to know the signals.”
“But it’s risky to say something simply, concretely, to have it judged on its content and remembered as yours.”
“Before we decide how to listen to a story, we put people on a spectrum. Do they come to us with need or with potential? Should we listen with our guard up or our imagination on? Will aligning with this person benefit or drain us? How does the storyteller signal, even before that first interaction, that they are worthy of an unguarded, imaginative listen?”
“The code works; it’s just that only a few of us are trained in it.” (few = privileged and powerful and fighting to keep it that exclusive)
“Today's asylum officers are instructed to dig out inconsistencies. Trained to disbelieve, they demand a perfect performance...” (And isn’t that the opposite of what should be the point?)
“Most human conversation is inconsistent, and inexact. This is how the trap works. It takes discipline to repeat an answer again and again, the precise way you said it before. [For torture survivors], fear makes consistency even less likely.”
"Each culture has their own ideas of what a 'real' victim sounds like."
“Just as grief performance is shaped by culture, so is all storytelling. But it is also singular. Stories worth telling are created by our relationships with culture - they are strange, unrepeatable. That's what makes them worth telling.” (So how does this translate to situations of accuracy/believability?)
“It’s an age-old problem; every pain is only truly felt by one person. We are programmed to intuit our own suffering, to salve our own wounds.”
"Those who are systematically disbelieved always come out defenses first."
“Familiarity breeds empathy.” / “We want others’ pain to mirror our own; sensory recall removes our doubt.”
“Sometimes, in desperate moments, we are exactly the thing we’re pretending to be.”
“Fairy tale speech acts work if the powerful want them to work.”
“It can take decades to unwrite a story that was crafted in hours.” and the related “…once something enters the record, it's impossible to pry it out, and once there is any kind of narrative, the system from hunting near and far for truth, to proving or disproving that narrative, however silly it might be.”
“How do you know if you have a bad heart, when you’ve only had the one?”
“We’ve relaxed into our shortcuts, and we’re primed to be fooled.”
“We all look to verify what we think we know.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Colonisation, Blood, Genocide, Deportation, Gaslighting, Classism, Confinement, Death, Drug abuse, Islamophobia, Kidnapping, Medical content, Grief, Hate crime, Murder, Religious bigotry, Injury/Injury detail, Medical trauma, Mental illness, Pregnancy, Police brutality, Racism, Rape, Sexism, Violence, War, Sexual assault, Sexual violence, Suicide, Torture, Toxic relationship, and Gun violence
catbooking's review against another edition
5.0
Less of a scholarly work and more of a collection of personal experiences. Still a fascinating exploration into what truth means for us in general and more specifically in our personal lives.
lifeinpoetry's review against another edition
1.0
Holy shit, this was the most sanist book I've read to completion in many years. Compassion is extended to the oppression and systemic lack of belief in the stories and pain of refugees, torture survivors, women (especially mothers) of color, pain medication seeking by people with sickle cell or cancer (the only illnesses seen as credible), people who are sent home by medical professionals and die as a result, the parents and family of the mentally ill, etc., etc. There is a dearth of compassion for the (severely) mentally ill and to a much lesser extent people with sick cell or cancer seeking pain medication. There is a lot of talk of performing your pain, illness, suicide attempts, etc. without a shred of insight into the fact that most mentally ill do perform but not what she imagines, not their illness, they sometimes perform being neurotypical in situations where they do not feel comfortable/safe or as it's commonly known, masking.
There is the hideous idea that tough love, work, and applying how mental illness is treated in her country of origin, the country she fled from, will turn her brother-in-law into a neurotypical person, a worthy member of society who doesn't 'perform' mental illness. She later says the reference to her home country meant multiple squats by ordered by a stern uncle which only further exposes her ignorance regarding mental illness. At one point she gets to the point she changes her brother-in-law's name in her husband's phone in hopes he won't pick up his brother's calls requesting support. She instantly changes it back, realizing she's going too far, but it shows her complete lack of empathy regarding her brother-in-law.
She realizes by the end, after her brother-in-law's tragic suicide, she should have believed bur there is still the undergirding idea it's all a performance. Even in the last chapter she tells the story of a woman with Munchausen's who kills herself after she is not believed without a reference to the fact that Munchausen's is itself an illness. This seems to tie into her pet theory that her severely mentally brother-in-law was acting his pain and killed himself when it was not believed. Even when she first hears of his suicide, she imagines that he's alive with a few tiny cuts on his wrist, another gesture which is not to be taken seriously.
This was honestly such a difficult book to read. I wasn't triggered in the colloquial or clinical sense of the word, just sighed at the fact that three master's degrees do not guarantee care for and insight into (severe) mental illness, that they do not guard against ignorance. I honestly expected better from an author I knew had deep compassion for refugees which was the entire reason I had read some of her previous books and decided to read this one.
P.S. Also, lose me with that bullshit idea about becoming 'free' via suicide. I know many neurotypical people and even some of those with mental health issues view the lives of the severely mentally ill like the brother-in-law (and me) as sad and pathetic but come on. The brother-in-law in the memoir made multiple attempts to go inpatient before his suicide and was denied by a shitty healthcare system, there was obviously a huge part of him that wanted to live.
There is the hideous idea that tough love, work, and applying how mental illness is treated in her country of origin, the country she fled from, will turn her brother-in-law into a neurotypical person, a worthy member of society who doesn't 'perform' mental illness. She later says the reference to her home country meant multiple squats by ordered by a stern uncle which only further exposes her ignorance regarding mental illness. At one point she gets to the point she changes her brother-in-law's name in her husband's phone in hopes he won't pick up his brother's calls requesting support. She instantly changes it back, realizing she's going too far, but it shows her complete lack of empathy regarding her brother-in-law.
She realizes by the end, after her brother-in-law's tragic suicide, she should have believed bur there is still the undergirding idea it's all a performance. Even in the last chapter she tells the story of a woman with Munchausen's who kills herself after she is not believed without a reference to the fact that Munchausen's is itself an illness. This seems to tie into her pet theory that her severely mentally brother-in-law was acting his pain and killed himself when it was not believed. Even when she first hears of his suicide, she imagines that he's alive with a few tiny cuts on his wrist, another gesture which is not to be taken seriously.
This was honestly such a difficult book to read. I wasn't triggered in the colloquial or clinical sense of the word, just sighed at the fact that three master's degrees do not guarantee care for and insight into (severe) mental illness, that they do not guard against ignorance. I honestly expected better from an author I knew had deep compassion for refugees which was the entire reason I had read some of her previous books and decided to read this one.
P.S. Also, lose me with that bullshit idea about becoming 'free' via suicide. I know many neurotypical people and even some of those with mental health issues view the lives of the severely mentally ill like the brother-in-law (and me) as sad and pathetic but come on. The brother-in-law in the memoir made multiple attempts to go inpatient before his suicide and was denied by a shitty healthcare system, there was obviously a huge part of him that wanted to live.
karissayoung's review
4.0
3.75 – An important read about unconscious bias that sheds light on societal issues that are often overlooked by those who are unaffected. Interweaving a variety of heavy stories and case studies with philosophical thought, Nayeri first posts the question: why are honest asylum seekers dismissed as liars? before more broadly questioning, who gets believed? It is a thoughtful text that urges readers to reconsider what they believe to be true, and be open to changing perspectives when new information is revealed.
The text is informative with elements of a memoir – Nayeri includes personal experiences such as her views on her brother-in-law’s mental health challenges as an example of personal bias and re-evaluation. I did find that the structure of the book was a bit disorganized and difficult to follow, but if readers focus on the author’s thesis, this is a worthwhile read.
Thank you to NetGalley, Catapult, and Dina Nayeri for this ARC of Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough.
The text is informative with elements of a memoir – Nayeri includes personal experiences such as her views on her brother-in-law’s mental health challenges as an example of personal bias and re-evaluation. I did find that the structure of the book was a bit disorganized and difficult to follow, but if readers focus on the author’s thesis, this is a worthwhile read.
Thank you to NetGalley, Catapult, and Dina Nayeri for this ARC of Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough.