Quotes About Psychiatry

My parents were from a generation where you tended to your own problems, one where psychotherapy was an indulgence. They both came from families where you kept your problems to yourself and got on with life. If Keller was starting to act a little out of the ordinary, wasn't everybody trying to quote-unquote find themselves in Southern California in the early seventies? Not to mention that psychiatry had a cuckoo's-nest edge of paranoia about it.

Coping with any death is traumatic; suicide compounds the anguish because we are forced to deal with two traumatic events at the same time. According to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the level of stress resulting from the suicide of a loved one is ranked as catastrophic–equivalent to that of a concentration camp experience.

The more I attempted to escape through self-consultation, self-help therapies, psychology, psychiatry, and self-analysis, the more frustrated I became.

Psychiatrists classify a person as neurotic if he suffers from his problems in living, and a psychotic if he makes others suffer.

The psychiatrist must become a fellow traveller with his patient.

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings.

Psychiatry is the care of the id by the odd.

Sleep is probably the most important biological function. If you don't get enough sleep, you can get psychiatric illnesses and all types of different illnesses.

The corridor of the Psychiatry Department of La Luz City University Medical Facility was a sterile affair. Since then it's been painted in a mellow magnolia and there's some framed artwork on the walls. We had a memo before the prints went up, checking whether we considered them suitably 'non-stimulating'. We all joked about that for a long time afterwards. 'Nice jacket,' we'd say, 'but are you sure it's non-stimulating enough?

akinetic mutism,

I could easily have spent one half of my life in a psychiatric hospital, and the other half in the Priory.

In the past, men created witches: now they create mental patients.

An aha experienced decades ago by one of us is relevant to this point. Halfway through a grueling clinical internship, CP [Christopher Peterson] complained to his supervisor, "No one [meaning the patients] ever says thank you for anything I try to do." The response from the experienced psychiatrist stopped CP mid-whine: "If they [the patients] could say thank you, how many of them do you think would be in a psychiatric hospital?

Patsy McDonald had the artificial brightness and dead eyes that go hand in hand with prescription antidepressants. They

She was feeling too much right now, and that was dangerous. Being a good psychiatrist was like reading a novel at forty. You needed to keep the words at arm's length or everything became a blur.

One of the fundamental truths of psychiatry was that sometimes you had to leave a patient who needed you. She

Psychiatrists use tortures you have never even heard of! They drug their patients and send huge jolts of electricity through their brains to destroy nerve responses! And that isn't all! At a whim, they take a steel probe, push it under the eyelids and scramble the prefrontal lobes! They have no intention of curing anyone. They are simply making it impossible for the victim to get well. Ever! AND THEY KNOW IT!

A psychiatrist who professes to be a healer of souls, but who keeps people asleep, treats them for waking up, and drugs them asleep again (increasingly effectively as this field of technology sharpens its weapons), helps to drive them crazy.

In the long run, shame always outlives physical pain. "Anyone who thinks of a shameful memory will experience it at least as vividly as when they had the original experience,

Philosophers and psychiatrists should explain why it is that we mathematicians are in the habit of systematically erasing our footsteps. Scientists have always looked askance at this strange habit of mathematicians, which has changed little from Pythagoras to our day.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

For the diagnostic categories for which drugs are far and away the first-line form of treatment, such as the 'mood disorders', 'eating disorders', 'psychotic disorders' and 'anxiety disorders', an average of 88% of all DSM-IV panel members had drug company financial ties.

You can see neurosis from below - as a sickness - as most psychiatrists see it. Or you can understand it as a compassionate man might: respecting the neurosis as a fumbling and inefficient effort toward good ends.

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.