Quotes About Psychiatry

You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'

You'd be amazed how little choice you have about loony bins.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as delusion of reprieve. The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. No one could yet grasp the fact that everything would be taken away. all we possessed, literally, was our naked existence.

For too long a time--for half a century, in fact--psychiatry tried to interpret the human mind merely as a mechanism, and consequently the therapy of mental disease merely in terms of technique. I believe this dream has been dreamt out. What now begins to loom on the horizon is not psychologized medicine but rather those of human psychiatry.

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.

An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.

As a psychiatrist, Frankl avoided direct reference to his personal religious beliefs. He was fond of saying that the aim of psychiatry was the healing of the soul, leaving to religion the salvation of the soul.

psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad. Just the sight of the red cheeks and round faces of those prisoners was a great encouragement.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. We, too, clung to shreds of hope and believed to the last moment that it would not be so bad.

More and more, a psychiatrist is approached today by patients who confront him with human problems rather than neurotic symptoms.

In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis. An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo. Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist. For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified.

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. In actual fact, boredom is now causing, and certainly bringing to psychiatrists, more problems to solve than distress.

He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how," could be the guiding motto for all psychotherapeutic and psychohygienic efforts regarding prisoners.

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as "delusion of reprieve." The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be re- prieved at the very last minute.

It is nothing but a kind of microcosmos of communism—all that psychiatry,' rumbled Pnin, in his answer to Chateau. 'Why not leave their private sorrows to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

I discovered there was an endless source of robust enjoyment in trifling with psychiatrists.

Ta caÅ'a psychiatria to nic innego, jak tylko swoisty mikrokosmos komunizmu [...]. Lepiej by zostawili ludziom ich kÅ'opoty osobiste. Nasuwa siÄ™ bowiem pytanie, czy kÅ'opoty nie sÄ… jedynÄ… rzeczÄ… na Å›wiecie, którÄ… ludzie mogÄ… mie? na wÅ'asno???

In 1955, at their peak, American mental hospitals held 560,000 patients nationwide, double the number at the turn of the twentieth century. By 1988, three decades later, that figure had fallen to 120,000.

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

Symbolism, to Carnaday, was superstitious nonsense. Psychiatry, though, was worse. It was the purest sort of buncombe, hardly as respectable as spiritualism.

Psychiatry is at present a significantly descriptive and classificatory science which is still more somatically than psychologically oriented, and which lacks possibilities for explaining observed phenomena. But psychoanalysis is not in opposition to psychiatry, as one might be led to believe by the almost unanimous behaviour of psychiatrists.

...the new life of psychiatry is with us...