Quotes from Carl Elliott

On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity.

The danger of academic life, thought Wittgenstein, is that we are encouraged to go on talking even when we know in our hearts that we have nothing valuable to say.

We are led into philosophical confusion, thought Wittgenstein, by seeking explanations at times when we should instead simply stop and say, "This is how things are.

The very use of the term "mental illness" (rather than, say, "neurosis", "insanity", "nervous breakdown", or other euphemisms) can be seen as an effort to move certain kinds of psychological distress into the biomedical realm.

This is not something you or I do. This is something the poor do so that the rich get better drugs.

Medical care is neither a right nor a privilege: it is a service provided by doctors and other to people who wish to purchase it.

What makes our contemporary neurobiological concepts different is the extent to which they have been promoted by pharmaceutical marketers. You are not shy; you have social anxiety disorder. You are not absentminded, dreamy, or fidgety; you have ADHD. You are not moody; you are bipolar. Each diagnosis comes with a prescription. Your need for medication becomes part of your identity.

In America I have seen the freest and best educated of men in circumstances the happiest to be found in the world, yet it seemed to me that a cloud habitually hung on their brow, and they seemed serious and almost sad even in their pleasures.

As our culture has shifted the locus of meaning in life away from God and onto individual psychology, we have created a moral yardstick that measures the success of a human life in terms of psychological well-being. As

Meanwhile, our patchwork regulatory system insures that no single institution is keeping track of how many deaths and injuries befall healthy subjects in clinical trials. Nobody appears to be tracking how many clinical investigators are incompetent of have lost their licenses, or have questionable disciplinary records.. Nobody is monitoring the effect that so many trials have on the health of professional guinea pigs. In fact, nobody is even certain whether the trials generate reliable data.

The whole business of medical journals is corrupt because owners are making money from restricting access to important research, most of it funded by public money.

As the figure of the traditional doctor fades away, it is being replaced by a figure to the drug rep, one whose responsibility is to compete as vigorously as possible in the medical marketplace. Patients are being replaced by health-care consumers, who shop for the best medical bargains they can find.