Clinically Quotes & Sayings

Clinically speaking, depression is a pessimistic sense of your own capabilities, and despondent lack of energy. — Jane McGonigal

Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. — Harlan Coben

Care of the soul asks for a cultivation of the larger world depression represents. When we speak clinically of depression, we think of an emotional or behavioral condition, but when we imagine depression as a visitation by Saturn, then many qualities of his world come into view: the need for isolation, the coagulation of fantasy, the distilling of memory, and accommodation with death, to name only a few. For — Thomas Moore

It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed ... If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. — David Foster Wallace

I read an article somewhere that stated 1 in 4 American women will be considered clinically depressed in their lifetime. This should be more than a gold mine for pharmaceutical companies - it should be a wake-up call. — Marianne Williamson

You want to go out to dinner sometime?
Sorry, no. I'm married, not hungry, infected with seven unknown diseases, gay, pregnant with lizards and clinically dead. — Warren Ellis

Perhaps I was also afraid the little voice in the back of my head telling me I had no idea what I was doing was right. I didn't have any idea what I was doing; if I had, things would be different now. Although, thoughts like this led the other little voice inside my head to point out if I wasn't here, or if I didn't know what I was doing, Martin would be a chalk outline of some goo on the pavement. I sighed audibly and put my head on my desk. If only all the voices in my head could just get along. I laughed at the absurdity. I must be clinically insane. — G.K. Parks

Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is not that it happens but that it seems to confer many of the psychological benefits of genuine control. In fact, the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed, who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situation. — Daniel M. Gilbert

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically defineable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time. — Harold S. Kushner

A third of the people who rush to psychiatrists for help could probably cure themselves if they could only do as Margaret Yates did: get interested in helping others. My idea? No, that is approximately what Carl Jung said. And he ought to know - if anybody does. He said: "About one third of my patients are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives." To put it another way, they are trying to thumb a ride through life - and the parade passes them by. So they rush to a psychiatrist with their petty, senseless, useless lives. Having missed the boat, they stand on the wharf, blaming everyone except themselves and demanding that the world cater to their self-centered desires. — Dale Carnegie

But I am clinically depressed and have an anxiety disorder, which interferes with things like studying and learning and breathing and living. He thinks it's something I can just turn off and on with willpower. — Leslie Stella

The people from the suburbs are bringing along their suburban values: cleanliness, orderliness, safety - dullness, in other words. As a result, urban areas are being hollowed out. Just look at Times Square in New York. No more sex shops, no drugs, no homeless people. The area is clinically clean and incredibly dull. — Rem Koolhaas

The (Laetrile) efficacy tests ... clinically in humans..(by) the US NCI ... were obviously conducted so that a negative result could be formulated. The limited number and types of human cancer cases selected ... the omission of necessary additional measures ('e.g dietary'), the far too short observation periods, and the undefined chemical properties of the (Laetrile) ... all contributed to devaluation of ... conclusions. — Hans Alfred Nieper

Forget he never wanted this in the first place. Forget he was convinced she might be clinically insane and definitely feral. The bottom line was, she ran. She didn't even stop to shower. She woke up, saw Zach lying next to her, and took to the Texas hills. Not a good sign when one was just starting out in a relationship. — Shelly Laurenston

Smartassitis might not be a clinically defined disease, but it should be. — Mindee Arnett

You people realize you're going to visit a person who is clinically insane in order to find out your future, right?' Lexie says. 'I mean, who's crazier, the person who's been put in a mental institution or the person who asks that person for advice? — Bree Despain

Ferbus assumed a hyperventilating position, his hands on his knees. 'Oh no,' Skyla said, concern splashing across her face. 'Is he anemic? Clinically asthmatic?'
'No,' Uncle Mort said, thwacking Ferbus on the head as he started climbing the stairs. 'Just lazy.'
'Clinically lazy!' Ferbus wheezed. — Gina Damico

Our analyses of the FDA data showed relatively little difference between the effects of antidepressants and the effects of placebos. Indeed, the effects were so small that they did not qualify as clinically significant. The drug companies knew how small the effect of their medications were compared to placebos, and so did the FDA and other regulatory agencies. The companies found various ways to make the data seem more favorable to their products, and the FDA helped them keep their negative data secret. In fact, in some instances, the FDA urged the companies to keep negative data hidden, even when the companies wanted to reveal them. My colleagues and I hadn't really discovered anything new. We had merely revealed their 'dirty little secret'. — Irving Kirsch

Like most clinically depressed patients, she appeared to function better in focused activity than in stasis. Their normal paralyzed stasis allowed these patients' own minds to chew them apart. But it was always a titanic struggle to get them to do anything to help them focus. — David Foster Wallace

Like many others before him, Abbott discovers, once married, that marriage is a battle - clinically, a negotiation - over the possession of the Bad Mood. — Chris Bachelder

Even when I'm in a really great, steady and stable place ... I'm clinically bipolar, so that always exists - a darkness always exists. — Mary Lambert

There's nothing clinically wrong with me, only an emotional imbalance - I pass too quickly from the wildest enthusiasm to the blackest despair. — Henri Matisse

Shea took her time braiding her hair, fussing over her blue jeans, adjusting her ribbed cotton shirt, allowing her mind time to cope with the new knowledge. It was frightening yet fascinating. She wished she had observed it in someone other than herself. It was hard to accept it clinically when it was her own body she was studying.
Such a nice body.
She nearly dropped her brush. Will you stop! Just the low velvet touch of his voice sent heat curling through her body. It was sinful and unfair to have such a voice.
I did not think you would ever speak with me as a lifemate would. I waited long for that impatient comment. There was a teasing note now. — Christine Feehan

I was told that I had very likely been clinically depressed for a long, long time, probably since I was 15, or even 14. It explained, to me at least, a lot of my behaviour over the years. — Marianne Faithfull

Psychologists have clinically observed that overly prolonged grief in the bereaved usually signifies a poor relationship with the one who died. — Robert E. Neale

Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. — Aime Cesaire

Twilight fans are literally on the verge of being clinically insane. — Robert Pattinson

I do believe that when we're in the process of dying, that all these emergency circuits in the brain take over. I base what I'm saying not on any empirical evidence. I think it's very possible that when you're dying, these circuits open up, which would explain this whole white-light phenomena - when people clinically die and they see their relatives and stuff and say, "Hello, it's great to see you." — Stephen King

More than a billion adults worldwide are now overweight - and at least 300 million of them are clinically obese. Childhood obesity is already epidemic in some areas and on the rise in others. Worldwide, an estimated 17.6 million children under five are said to be overweight. — Morgan Spurlock

Tourette's syndrome is seen in every race, every culture, every stratum of society; it can be recognized at a glance once one is attuned to it; and cases of barking and twitching, of grimacing, of strange gesturing, of involuntary cursing and blaspheming, were recorded by Aretaeus of Cappadocia almost two thousand years ago. Yet it was not clinically delineated until 1885, when Georges Gilles de la Tourette, a young French neurologist - a pupil of Charcot's and a friend of Freud's - put together these historical accounts with observations of some of his own patients. The syndrome as he described it was characterized, above all, by convulsive tics, — Oliver Sacks

There's still always the possibility that I've gone totally, clinically cuckoo. But somehow I don't think so anymore.
An article I once read said that crazy people don't worry about being crazy - that's the whole problem. — Lauren Oliver

And all that time I was lying to my support group. I told the ladies, "Sure! I'm writing!" when I wasn't. Yes, I could have filled all those newfound minutes with actual work, but I had no confidence in myself. I was a fraud. Who was I to pick up a pen and expect anything good to come out of it? I expected perfection as soon as the pencil hit the paper, and since that's impossible, I couldn't get myself to start. Then I felt guilty about not starting, which made me want to start even less. And with no game to bury the feelings, I got very depressed. No wonder I didn't book any acting jobs in the last half of 2006. No one wanted to hire a clinically depressed person to sell snack foods. — Felicia Day

It's a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. extremely psycho. Trust me. — Marisa De Los Santos

If there was a party, everyone in turn would come sit next to me to regale me with how he or sh thought I should live and what I deserved to have. What it boiled down to was that I should live like them. Elvire, one half of a tightly knit couple would forget that her husband was clinically depressed. Guillaume, married to a harpy, maintained that if one laid low and said amen to everything, things worked out. Maria, fed up to the teeth with her children, wanted me to have my own. Assia loved women but it was killing her mother. Patrizio had bruises on his shoulders from his chronically jealous wife. Not one of them could stand my singleness, because it could have been theirs. — Sophie Fontanel

I should coldly, clinically think of myself and stop worrying about other people, as though I'm a necessary woman, indispensable to their happiness and well-being. Self-preservation is the first law. I must start trying to obey the law. — Helen Van Slyke

It probably says something really clinically terrible about my character that I need to get up on a stage and go 'Ra ra ra' in front of people. — Dylan Moran

To me it comes naturally, the peaks and valleys, sadness with happiness. I've definitely had periods, maybe, where I haven't been happy. Whether it's from a breakup or the good, old-fashioned blues - but I wouldn't say clinically depressed. — Luke Wilson

Mothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most other professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year ... You go to work when you're sick, maybe even clinically depressed, because motherhood is perhaps the only unpaid position where failure to show up can result in arrest. — Mary Blakely

I'm shy, but I'm not clinically shy. I don't have social anxiety disorder or anything like that. I more have a gentle shyness. Like, I have a little trouble mingling at parties. — Samantha Bee

Normal people hadn't been molested or reared by a clinically psychotic mother, an alcoholic father, or a perversely mad psychiatrist who wore a Santa hat and performed toilet bowl readings. These were normal people, and I lived among them now. I thought, This must be what I want. — Augusten Burroughs

Normal people - i.e., people who aren't actors - are the most bizarre people you can ever come across. I'll talk to someone and come away thinking, 'They are clinically insane.' — Michael Sheen

In 2002, a Cochrane Collaboration review of the evidence concluded that low-fat diets induced no more weight loss than calorie-restricted diets, and in both cases the weight loss achieved "was so small as to be clinically insignificant." A similar analysis was published in 2001 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In this case, the authors identified twenty-eight relevant trials of low-fat diets, of which at least twenty were also calorie-restricted. The overweight subjects consumed, on average, less than seventeen hundred calories a day for an average weight loss of not quite nine pounds over six months. — Gary Taubes

I have been clinically depressed for most of my life. I once used drugs to fix it. Then I stopped. I stopped because I decided they were making me stupid, and I'd rather be miserable than stupid. I am what I am. — Neal Stephenson

Clinically, angina pectoris was known to be precipitated by anxiety and emotion just as well as by exercise. — James Black

In our secular world, we no longer see eternal paradise as a carrot at the end of the stick of life, but try to cram as much as possible into our relatively short time on the planet instead. This is, of course, a futile endeavour, doomed to failure. It is tempting to interpret the modern epidemics of depression and burnout as the individual's response to the unbearable nature of constant acceleration. The decelerating individual - who slows down instead of speeding up, and maybe even stops completely - seems out of place in a culture characterised by manic development, and may be interpreted pathologically (i.e. diagnosed as clinically depressed). — Svend Brinkmann

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well. — Frantz Fanon

The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed! — Peter Schjeldahl

As a teenager I was clinically depressed. Although I had lots of friends, I found those years very difficult. — Lena Headey

I was almost tragically shy, like, clinically. I should've been admitted somewhere. I think my parents knew, but maybe they didn't think much about it. It's hard walking the Earth shy. You miss out on a lot. — Joelle Carter

This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on your TV everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing. — Maynard James Keenan

Of course she's right. How bad are things when your clinically insane mother is more rational than you are? — Susan Ee

there are still enormous numbers of people who had utterly ordinary wartime experiences and yet feel dangerously alienated back home. Clinically speaking, such alienation is not the same as PTSD - and maybe deserves its own diagnostic term - but both result from military service abroad, so it's understandable that vets and clinicians alike are prone to conflating them. Either way, it makes one wonder exactly what it is about modern society that is so mortally dispiriting to come home to. A — Sebastian Junger

If you are clinically insane, by which I mean you wake up in the morning, and you think you are an onion, this is your car, (about the BMW X3). — Jeremy Clarkson

But when I went to Harvard, it kind of got washed out of me, partly because people made fun of you in college. If you said you believed in God, they would look at you clinically, you know, suggest that you needed a referral. — Jonathan Kozol

I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course if you live that way you are clinically insane. — Martin Scorsese

Doctors kept stressing that mental disease was the same as physical disease. Telling someone who was clinically depressed, for example, to shake it off and get out of the house was tantamount to telling a man with two broken legs to sprint across the room. That was all well and good in theory, but in practice, the stigma continued. Maybe, to be more charitable, it was because you could hide a mental disease. — Harlan Coben

Excuse me,' he said. 'I know this is a personal question. But are you clinically insane?'
'Possible, but very unlikely. Why? — Neil Gaiman

There is in fact a category of people who get unusually close to the truth about themselves and the world. Their self-perceptions are more balanced,they assign responsibility for success and failure more even-handedly, and their predictions for the future are more realistic. These people are living testimony to the dangers of self-knowledge. They are the clinically depressed. — Cordelia Fine

I've been clinically diagnosed with sociopathy,' I said. 'Do you know what that means?'
'It means you're a freak,' he said.
'It means that you're about as important to me as a carboard box,' I said. 'You're just a thing - a piece of garbage that no one's thrown away yet. Is that what you want me to say?'
'Shut up,' said Rob. He was still acting tough, but I could see his bluster was starting to fail. He didn't know what to say.
'The thing about boxes,' I said, 'is that you can open them up. Even though they're completely boring on the outside, there might be something interesting inside. So while you're saying all of these stupid, boring things I'm imagining what it would be like to cut you open and see what you've got in there. — Dan Wells

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented. — Baruj Benacerraf

Few family members act on warning signs when they first present themselves in a schizophrenic patient. It is often quite hard to realize, in fact, that something is clinically wrong. — Holly Schindler

Man (and woman) has an infinite capacity for self-development. Equally, he has an infinite capacity for self-destruction. A human being may be clinically alive and yet, despite all appearances, spiritually dead. — Idries Shah

One study concluded that there were 1.7 errors per patient per day in America's ICUs. Of these errors, 29 percent could have caused clinically significant harm or death. Given that the average ICU length of stay is three days, this research suggests that nearly all patients hospitalized in the ICU sustain a potentially life-threatening mistake at some point during their stay. — Peter Pronovost

Psychologist Carl Jung, in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, wrote, "About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time."3 Jung wrote those words in the early part of the twentieth century, but with every passing year and decade their truth has become even more glaring. Holocaust — David Jeremiah

The effect was of somebody reluctantly reading a prepared statement off a teleprompter, a statement prepared by somebody against whom she had a bitter and long-standing grudge. He considered the possibility that she might be clinically depressed. — Lev Grossman

Though there're minor side effects in male adults."
"What side effect?"
She cocked an eyebrow and lowered her voice. "Spontaneous prolonged erection, big guy ... in some test subjects," she added clinically. "A lot of those early tests were done on gorillas ...
"I'm not a gorilla."
She glanced down the front of his lab coat. "Not yet. — Ophelia London

I don't want you to think I don't love my extended family. I do. I just don't want to be around them. Some of this is because I'm a loner. Some of this is because at family gatherings you are forced to face the short genetic distance between you and a clinically insane person. — Jim Gaffigan

And what if many-even if most-of the Slothropian stars are proved, some distant day, to refer to sexual fantasies instead of real events? This would hardly invalidate our approach, any more than it did young Sigmund Freud's, back there in old Vienna, facing a similar violation of probability-all those Papi-has-raped-me stories, which might have been lies evidentially, but were certainly the truth clinically. You must realize: we are concerned, at PISCES, with a rather strictly defined, clinical version of truth. We seek no wider agency in this. — Thomas Pynchon

Deborah looked at me with a frown, and I frowned back. What Alana said made sense, of course, especially to someone untroubled by human feelings, like I used to be. It was clinically cold reasoning, serpentine but clear, and that certainly fit what we were coming to know about Alana. And yet - something was wrong with it, whether it was the way she said it or something else, I couldn't say; it didn't quite add up for me. — Jeff Lindsay

... and Lynn is dead inside, like a corpse. She Instagrams methodically, clinically, as if she's gathering evidence for defense, like her entire life is dedicated to proving that she has a life. — Caroline Kepnes

When you're clinically depressed the serotonin in your brain is out of balance and probably always will be out of balance. So I take medication to get that proper balance back. I'll probably have to be on it the rest of my life. — Terry Bradshaw

Nin - " Jasper said, and his pained tone was a reminder that, however he had transgressed, he hadn't done so entirely callously. His affection for her was not fake; it just was partial. Or perhaps it was fake, he was faking emotion now, and he had a personality disorder; but between these possibilities, she preferred to see him as inadequate rather than clinically diagnosable. "I'm going to do better," he said. "Starting now, I'm getting my act together. Don't give up on me." "Oh, Jasper," Liz said. "I already have. — Curtis Sittenfeld

The year that 'Lost' started and premiered was, without a doubt, the most miserable year of my life. The level of despair and anguish that I was feeling; I was clinically depressed, and anyone that you talked to who knew me at the time will tell you that. — Damon Lindelof

Having worked as a clinician for almost 40 years, I have seen some young adults, who had the classic, clear and conspicuous signs of Asperger's syndrome in early childhood, achieve over decades a range of social abilities and improvements in behaviour such that the diagnostic characteristics became sub-clinical; that is, the person no longer has a clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important area of functioning. There may still be very subtle signs of Asperger's syndrome, but when the diagnostic tests are re-administered, the person achieves a score below the threshold to maintain the diagnosis. There is now longitudinal research that is starting to confirm clinical experience that about 10 per cent of those who originally had an accurate diagnosis of Asperger's syndrome in childhood no longer have sufficient impairments to justify the diagnosis (Cederlund et al. 2008; Farley et al. 2009). — Tony Attwood

Blankets make great traps for the clinically insane, but a straightjacket might work better. — Nicole McKay