Quotes About Psychiatry

My philosophy is really based on humility. I don't think we know enough to fix either diagnostics or therapeutics. The future of psychiatry is clinical neuroscience, based on a much deeper understanding of the brain.

Psychologists and psychiatrists send me cards and say, 'Hey, I love your books.'

The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.

What the Ellison Foundation and I are hoping to encourage is a more holistic approach to psychiatry, in which psychotherapy is put on as rigorous a level as psychopharmacology.

Most psychiatrists assume that mental illnesses such as depression are caused by chemical imbalances in the brain, which can be treated by drugs. But most psychotherapy doesn't address the social causation of mental illness either.

I don't like psychiatry. I don't believe it works. I believe psychiatrists are neurotic or psychotic, for the most part.

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

To Americans the idea of a problem without a solution is insupportable; and any direct encounter with the "human condition", that is, the inevitability of loss and defeat, sends them scurrying off to psychiatrists or on a frantic pursuit of power, money, world records.

This process of active clinging to an outmoded view of reality is the basis for much mental illness. Psychiatrists refer to it as transference.

We know the world only through our relationship to it. Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must simultaneously examine the examiner. Psychiatrists are taught this in their training and know that it is impossible to realistically understand the conflicts and transferences of their patients without understanding their own transferences and conflicts.

We do this by a variety of means which psychiatrists call defense mechanisms. All of us employ such defenses, thereby limiting our awareness. If in our laziness and fear of suffering we massively defend our awareness, then it will come to pass that our understanding of the world will bear little or no relation to reality.

Nada tenho que ver com a ciência; mas, se tantos homens em quem supomos são reclusos por dementes, quem nos afirma que o alienado não é o alienista?

Our brains are embodied—much of the problem with the debate over addiction and psychiatry more generally is a refusal to accept this and our ongoing need to see "physical," "neurological," and "psychological" as completely distinct.

There are all kinds of psychological disorders in the West that don't exist in Asia.

He's paragon schnitzophonic." "He's what?!" "Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?

Some people embrace their gifts with gratitude. Others have no use for them and can think only of overcoming their weaknesses. Only their defects interest and challenge them. Thus those who hate people may seek them out. Misanthropes often practice psychiatry. The shy become performers. Natural thieves look for positions of trust. The frightened make bold moves.

The first is that fourteen major mental illnesses are now treatable. Two of them are curable, either by specific forms of psychotherapy or specific drugs. The two curable ones—people always ask—are probably panic disorder and blood and injury phobia. So the first great thing that psychology and psychiatry did in our lifetime was to be able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering.

This is the tome that guides haruspication—I mean, psychiatry.)

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.

The dark dangerous forest is still there, my friends. Beyond the space of the astronauts and the astronomers, beyond the dark, tangled regions of Freudian and Jungian psychiatry, beyond the dubious psi-realms of Dr. Rhine, beyond the areas policed by commissars and priests and motivations-research men, far, far beyond the mad, beat, half-hyserical laughter...the utterly unknown still is and the eerie and ghostly lurk, as much wrapped in mystery as ever. A Bit of the Dark World

The one thing we do know is that the chemical imbalance theory - the theory that people get depressed when they don't have enough serotonin in their brain - we know that that's wrong.

By design were meant to eat fish and fish is good for you. Psychiatrists and therapists recommend it for depression, especially the omega-3 oils in mackerel.