Being a staff writer at The New Yorker, she wrote the book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us in 2022.

[1] She frequently writes about psychiatry; Tablet has referred to Aviv as "Janet Malcolm’s successor.

When she was six, she was admitted to the Children's Hospital of Michigan where she received six weeks of treatment for anorexia nervosa.

She has investigated Teen Challenge,[9] guardianship abuse,[10] family courts, and the possible innocence of convicted serial murderer and British neonatal nurse, Lucy Letby.

[11] In 2022, her book Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.