Quotes & Sayings About Mental Hospitals

We are Craiglockhart's success stories. Look at us. We don't remember, we don't feel, we don't think - at least beyond the confines of what's needed to do the job. By any proper civilized standard (but what does that mean now?) we are objects of horror. But our nerves are completely steady. And we are still alive. — Pat Barker

Jail has become the biggest mental health hospital. — Steven Magee

Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries. — Robert Anton Wilson

Getting from La Jolla to Alta Vista State Hospital isn't easy, unless you have a car or a breakdown. April's Father had a breakdown and they got him there in no time. — Tobias Wolff

Just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward? CHAPTER 30 RHUBARB By my twenty-fifth day in the hospital, two days after the biopsy, with a preliminary diagnosis in sight, my doctors thought it was a good time to officially assess my cognitive skills to record a baseline. — Susannah Cahalan

Mental hospitals are great for horror movies because they're already scary even without the horror or supernatural elements. This is a place where you can play with the ideas of one's sanity, what's real and what's not. — Michael Rasmussen

But what happens if such a patient, say myself, for instance, has rarely if ever experienced a normal state of functioning? What happens if such a patient has spent much of her life in mental hospitals, both pursuing and being pursued by one's illness after another? What happens if "regular life" to such a person has always meant cutting one's arms, or gagging? — Lauren Slater

Either way, Grayson found it ironic how such dissimilar circumstances, colleges, and mental hospitals, had led to the same awful apartment. — Dorothy McFalls

Churches were never meant to be mental hospitals. They were supposed to be military outposts under orders to storm the gates of hell. Every believer is on active duty and called to serve a higher purpose with the rank of their blessings and talents. — Shannon L. Alder

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to "mummy bags", subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps. — Antonella Gambotto-Burke

It's a funny thing because Britain was in a terrible state in those days. It limped from crisis to crisis. It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flower beds in roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. — Bill Bryson

But the real show was offstage. Dozens of men lounged along the tables that circled the main attraction. They ranged from eighteen to eighty, skinny to fat, stout to lanky. I saw home in them. I saw fathers, grandfathers, brothers, boyfriends, professors, bosses, and preachers. I imagined their houses, their families, their jobs, the coffee shops where they bought breakfast pastries, the hospitals their children were born in, and their neighborhood route for their dog's morning walk. I saw the gleam in their eyes as the girls swiveled around poles, sashayed in their direction, and sat atop their laps like children visiting Santa Claus. They seemed to love their oriental dolls with a toddler's English fluency. They had their happy endings. They would soon be boarding planes, flying far away from the poverty, the mental and emotional collateral damage, and the possible babies they conceived. Thailand was theirs. It was their escape, their medicine, and their sanctuary of sin. — Maggie Young

One of the most appalling comments on our present way of life is that half of all the beds in our hospitals are reserved for patients with nervous and mental troubles, patients who have collapsed under the crushing burden of accumulated yesterdays and fearful tomorrows. Yet a vast majority of those people would be walking the streets today, leading happy, useful lives, if they had only heeded the words of Jesus: Have no anxiety about the morrow; or the words of Sir William Osler; Live in day-tight compartments. — Dale Carnegie

People say mental hospitals are for the patients, in fact they are to protect society from them. They are justified in doing that. Society has to do what is best for itself. — Robert M. Pirsig

Emma cites the structure of the [Eating Disorder] Unit as being important to her decision to disengage from her illness, and the fact that she felt safe in it, and cared for.
'It was the first time I'd been in an environment where I felt comfortabe with all the people around me. I felt "I can be here and I can talk to anybody" and that was something that had been missing from my life'. — Carol Lee

In order to master compassion, you have to spend time getting to know monsters. When you can do that you will see that there are no monsters, only people that acted like monsters because no one gave them the time or compassion to hear their story. — Shannon L. Alder

The idea that all the people locked up in mental hospitals are sane while all the people walking about are mad is merely a literary cliche, put about by people who should be locked up. I assure you there is not much in it. Taken as a whole, the sane are out there the sick are in here. For example you are in here because you have delusions that sane people are put in mental hospitals. — Tom Stoppard

If we do not pay for children in good schools, then we are going to pay for them in prisons and mental hospitals. — Eleanor Roosevelt

It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward? — Susannah Cahalan

The anti-psychiatrists held various, sometimes conflicting views but one particular line of reasoning is attributable to all of them - they all pitched their arguments against the power of the psychiatric establishment. They argued that the psychiatric diagnosis is scientifically meaningless. It is a way of labeling undesirable behaviour, under the guise of medical intervention. Those who are diagnosed ill are subjected to treatment which is a violation of human rights and dignity. The situation amounts to psychiatry having a mandate to declare some citizens unfit to live in an 'ordinary' community. It claims to cure but the supposed beneficiaries of that cure are often held in hospitals against their will. Within a structure like this it is impossible to understand the real nature of mental suffering and it is just as impossible to develop a coherent system of help. — Zbigniew Kotowicz

I've obviously come from a health background. I was a doctor before I became a pollie and one of the things I'd like to do is to really build on the world-class health system we've got. I'm passionate about climate change because it's also a health issue. Things like extreme weather impact on people's health, the ability of our hospitals to cope, the impact on mental health, on farmers in regional areas - they're all serious health concerns. — Richard Di Natale

The term 'deinstitutionalization' conceals some simple truths, namely, that old, unwanted persons, formerly housed in state hospitals, are now housed in nursing homes; that young, unwanted persons, formerly also housed in state hospitals, are now housed in prisons or parapsychiatric facilities; and that both groups of inmates are systematically drugged with psychiatric medications. — Thomas Szasz

It was known as the Sick Man of Europe. It was in every way poorer than now. Yet there were flowerbeds on roundabouts, libraries and post offices in every village, cottage hospitals in abundance, council housing for all who needed it. It was a country so comfortable and enlightened that hospitals maintained cricket pitches for their staff and mental patients lived in Victorian palaces. If we could afford it then, why not now? Someone needs to explain to me how it is that the richer Britain gets the poorer it thinks itself. — Bill Bryson

My sense of urgency is very simple,' said the professor, 'I've remembered that much. It's because what I have to remember has to do with time running out. And that's what anxiety is, in a lot of people. They know they have to do something, they should be doing something else, not just living hand-to-mouth, putting paint on their faces and decorating their caves and playing nasty tricks on their rivals. No. They have to do something else before they die - and so the mental hospitals are full and the chemists flourishing. — Doris Lessing

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals. — Thomas R. Insel