Quotes About Psychiatry

More recently, western enthusiasts of shamanism (and anti-psychiatry) have reversed this process of labeling and asserted that people as schizophrenic, psychotic or epileptic are proto-shamans. Current trends in the study of shamanism now recognise the former position to be ethnocentric—that researchers have been judging shamanic behavior by western standards.

As Jean Goodwin, a physician, observes, "Despite evidence that half of psychiatric patients were abused in childhood, psychiatrists have yet to implement standard interview schedules that would make questioning in this area routine.

Mothers are often psychiatrically accused of alienating a child from the child's father if that child does not resent or hate the mother, or prefer the father.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

When I asked Robert Spitzer about the possibility that he'd inadvertently created a world in which ordinary behaviours were being labelled mental disorders, he fell silent. I waited for him to answer. But the silence lasted three minutes. Finally he said, 'I don't know.

He fulfilled the bipolar checklist. See? And so they gave him some pretty heavy-duty medication. It slowed him way down, to a drooling fat kid. And they declared the meds a success." It

maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder. I

the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was "the desire to run away from slavery" and the cure was to "whip the devil out of them

Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal," said Allen Frances.

American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.

the world that psychiatrists are wicked and must be stopped.

they saw how well behaved I was, and decided it meant I could only behave well in the environment of a psychiatric hospital and it proved I was mad." I

Once labeled schizophrenic the pseudopatient was stuck with that label. —DAVID ROSENHAN

name. It was truly a revolution in psychiatry, and a gold rush for drug companies, who suddenly had hundreds of new disorders they could invent medications for, millions of new patients they could treat. "The

My father had always been supremely suspicious of psychiatry. He viewed therapy as an invasion of privacy, mental health as a matter of self-discipline , and my mother's increasingly pointed suggestions that he talk to someone as acts of aggression - little lobbed grenades of blame for their unhappiness as a couple.

The history of psychiatry shows that many ideas and concepts that once had attained the status of incontrovertible facts were later discarded as nothing more than myths or superstitions. We are forced to the realization that the study of the nature and treatment of the neuroses--or emotional disorders--does not rest on any proven theorems or generally shared assumptions.

I was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry. The sight of the operating theater made me sweat. The idea of holding a scalpel caused coils to form in my belly. (It still does.) Surgery was the most difficult thing I could imagine. And so I became a surgeon.

There is so much drivel about psychoactive meds, so much corruption, bad faith, over- and underprescription, vagueness, profiteering, ignorance, and hope, that it's easy to forget they sometimes work, alleviating real suffering, at least for a time. This was such a time. I

I don't want to be idealized by a patient because of what I've written.

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.

Psychiatry, in fact, is wrestling with the ramifications of a drug that removes guilt and remorse. What kind of a world will we have when a rapist can take a morning-after pill?

In terms of noise, psychiatry is an extreme case.

In the words of one observer, "the reliance on the patient's subjective symptoms, the clinician's interpretation of the symptoms, and the absence of objective measure (such as a blood test) implant the seeds of diagnostic unreliability of psychiatric disorders." In this sense, psychiatry may prove especially resistant to attempts at noise reduction.