Quotes About Psychiatry

Girl, interrupted.

The brutal limitations placed on women's emotions, the pseudo-psychiatric judgements and labelling and the herding of women into therapy and psychiatry, calls attention to the fact that women are still the second sex, a sex that is denied the full range of human emotions.

While psychiatry is concerned with the question of why some people become insane, the real question is why most people do not become insane.

Betrayed by our beloved, we suffer the loss of a coherent narrative—the "internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings [creating] a stable sense of self," as psychiatrist Anna Fels defines it.

doctors advised intensive talk therapy, even electroshock treatment. Some gay men were castrated against their will, a procedure that removed their testicles and deadened the sex drive. Others were lobotomized, a medical practice that destroyed the connections between the frontal lobes and the thalamus of the brain, deadening just about all aspects of behavior.

Scientists have made extraordinary advances in understanding the brain and its disorders.

Manic depression is a type of depression, technically, and it's the opposite of uni-polar. Manic depression is also called bi-polar disorder. Some people don't like to call it that because they think it makes it sound too nice, when the reality is if you have manic-depression you have manic-depression.

Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.

The Citizens Commission on Human Rights, a lobby group created by the Church of Scientology that runs the psychiatry museum, maintains that no mental diseases have ever been proven to exist.

THIS MEANS THE LAST REASON TO HAVE PSYCHIATRY AROUND IS GONE

So, now I've been to see a drug counselor who told me I need to lay off the drugs and talk about my feelings, and a shrink who heard what I had to say and immediately put me on drugs.

He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.

I have discovered the value of psychology and psychiatry, that their teachings can undo knots in us and permit life to flow again and aid us in becoming more truly human.

dopamine (D2) receptor antagonist

Whereas the melancholic exhibits a state of general inhibition, in the manic patient even normal inhibitions of the instincts are partly or wholly abolished.

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry.

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.

The three books were The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch; Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America by Robert Whitaker; and Unhinged: The Trouble with Psychiatry—A Doctor's Revelations About a Profession in Crisis by Daniel Carlat.

Psychiatry's thought leaders shaped our society's understanding of mental disorders, and once they began serving as paid speakers, the pharmaceutical companies sent money their way through multiple channels.

There is a story that psychiatry doesn't dare tell, which shows that our societal delusion about the benefits of psychiatric drugs isn't entirely an innocent one. In order to sell our society on the soundness of this form of care, psychiatry has had to grossly exaggerate the value of its new drugs, silence critics, and keep the story of poor long-term outcomes hidden.