Quotes & Sayings About Mental Institutions

At some point in the last 20 years, the left moved to the center, and the right moved into a mental institution. — Bill Maher

Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. The system has to be sound
after all, it validates my professional status
therefore the problem must be with you. — Charles Eisenstein

Barbee had always wondered about mental institutions. He thought of taking notes for a feature story on this adventure at Glennhaven, as the evening wore on, began to seem remarkable for utter lack of anything noteworthy. It began to appear as a fragile never-never land, populated with timid souls in continual retreat from the real world outside and even from one another within. — Jack Williamson

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

I would like to start a discussion about ending solitary confinement. I'd like to start a discussion about the removal of MO wings - an "MO" is a "Mental Observation" inmate - from Rikers Island, to be set up in mental health institutions. You can't put people in jail for having mental disorders. — Cecily McMillan

Boundaries aren't all bad. That's why there are walls around mental institutions. — Peggy Noonan

Our prisons and our jails are now our mental health institutions — Hillary Clinton

A minority of the mentally ill stalkers who are arrested are deemed to be incurable, either because of their condition or because of their refusal to take medication. Many present a real danger to those they've focused on. Yet mental institutions are often unwilling to accept mentally ill patients prone to violence. — Linden Gross

'Environment' is not an abstract concern, or simply a matter of aesthetics, or of personal taste - although it can and should involve these as well. Man is shaped to a great extent by his surroundings. Our physical nature, our mental health, our culture and institutions, our opportunities for challenge and fulfillment, our very survival - all of these are directly related to and affected by the environment in which we live. They depend upon the continued healthy functioning of the natural systems of the Earth. — Richard M. Nixon

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution. — Tom Verlaine

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

Having deinstitutionalized mental health, we have not created the structure and the institutions to take care of people, to identify when there is a mental health problem, and to get the treatment to people. — Rob Portman

I think that it [the Church] stands for everything most hostile to the mental emancipation and stimulation of mankind. It is the completest, most highly organized system of prejudices and antagonisms in existence. Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. It presents many faces towards the world, but everywhere it is systematic in its fight against freedom. — H.G.Wells

Amy [Winehouse] increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that YouTube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death. — Russell Brand

In seeking to understand this gendered difference in the perception of prisoners, it should be kept in mind that as the prison emerged and evolved as the major form of public punishment, women continued to be routinely subjected to forms of punishment that have not been acknowledged as such. For example, women have been incarcerated in psychiatric institutions in greater proportions than in prisons. 79 Studies indicating that women have been even more likely to end up in mental facilities than men suggest that while jails and prisons have been dominant institutions for the control of men, mental institutions have served a similar purpose for women. That deviant men have been constructed as criminal, while deviant women have been constructed as insane. Regimes that reflect this assumption continue to inform the women's prison. Psychiatric drugs continue to be distributed far more extensively to imprisoned women than to their male counterparts. — Angela Y. Davis

My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour and twenty-five-thousand mental institutions. — Allen Ginsberg

Sometimes the world is so much sicker than the inmates of its institutions. — Joanne Greenberg

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people. — Michel Foucault

Once you've been committed to a mental institution you're considered a second-rate citizen from then on and retroactive. — Mary Jane Ward

The only people who have proof of their sanity are those who have been discharged from mental institutions — Marshall McLuhan

To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad was a tiny fraction of today's and what we would now call mental disorders were often understood as religious ecstasies or diabolical possessions. — Mike Jay

People outside of mental institutions need to have good morals so that the world will continue to work without any major interruptions - and happy endings will flourish. — Matthew Quick

America today is a "save yourself" society if there ever was one. But does it really work? The underdeveloped societies suffer from one set of diseases: tuberculosis, malnutrition, pneumonia, parasites, typhoid, cholera, typhus, etc. Affluent America has virtually invented a whole new set of diseases: obesity, arteriosclerosis, heart disease, strokes, lung cancer, venereal disease, cirrhosis of the liver, drug addiction, alcoholism, divorce, battered children, suicide, murder. Take your choice. Labor-saving machines have turned out to be body-killing devices. Our affluence has allowed both mobility and isolation of the nuclear family, and as a result, our divorce courts, our prisons and our mental institutions are flooded. In saving ourselves we have nearly lost ourselves. — John Piper

Once you've been in a mental institution, people are going to look at you funny. — Drew Barrymore

I'd watched too many schoolmates graduate into mental institutions, into group homes and jails, and I knew that locking people up was paranormal - against normal, not beside it. Locks didn't cure; they strangled. — Scott Westerfeld

Why is it that our many mental institutions are overcrowded? People will not take their time. They do not live in the present! For are not all fears, phobias, crippling anxieties tied in with the future - a time that has not yet come - and may not? And are not deep depressions, melancholias, and foolish guilt complexes connected with the past - a time that is gone, and is gone forever - a time that cannot be changed even by God Almighty? These dementias most certainly bespeak some relation to the fact that those plagued with them have not been objective enough to stay in contact with the one great gratuitous reality called now. — M. Raymond

The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness. — Ashley Montagu