Quotes & Sayings About Psychiatric

My mother was terribly invasive, all in the name of psychiatric honesty. It was a bad thing in some ways, but I do think it had the effect of making me interested in 'the truth' as a writer - more than beauty, more than having a shapely story. — Edmund White

Welcome to the psychiatric hotline: if you are obsessive compulsive press one repeatedly. If you are schizophrenic listen closely and a little voice will tell you which number to press. If you have borderline personality disorder hang up; you have already pushed everybody's buttons. — Barbara Oakley

Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern psychiatric treatments. — William Sargant

It has been remarked that when one passes among the patients of the psychiatric ward, he encounters among the several sufferers every aspect of normal personality in morbid exaggeration ... As one passes through the modern centers of enterprise and of higher learning, he is met with similar autonomies of development ... The scientist, the technician, the scholar, who have left the One for the Many are puffed up with vanity over their ability to describe precisely some minute portion of the world. Men so obsessed with fragments can no more be reasoned with than other psychotics. — Richard M. Weaver

I want everyone that has been abused by someone in their childhood to know that you can get past it. Having DID is not the end of the world; it's the beginning of your new life. DID allows the victim of exceptional abuse the ability to "forget" the abuse and continue living. Without it, I may have gone crazy as a teen and spent my life in a as a teen and spent my life in a psychiatric hospital. — Dauna Cole

It was after an incident such as this that my friends and family decided something must be done. They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off. — Mark Forsyth

A man who says that men are machines may be a great scientist. A man who says he is a machine is 'depersonalized' in psychiatric jargon. — R.D. Laing

Deliberately placed triggers for learned behaviours (programmes)
Although all abuse and trauma survivors may be "triggered" into intrusive flashbacks by present-day experiences that remind them of the trauma, the triggers deliberately installed by mind controllers are different, in that they are cues for conditioned behaviours. Some of these are behaviours such as going home, going outside (where someone is waiting), coming to the person who uses the trigger, or switching to a particular insider. Others are psychiatric symptoms such as flashbacks, self-harm, or suicide attempts, which are actually punishments given by insiders for disobedience or disloyalty. For many survivors, every trigger causes a switch to a part programmed to perform a particular behaviour associated with that trigger. For others, the front person remains present in the world but has an irresistible compulsion to perform the behaviour. — Alison Miller

The psychiatric ward was a really creepy place and, hindsight being 20/20, the creepiest thing about it was that I truly belonged there. — Steve-O

The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart. — Eric Kandel

I didn't get at first put into a rehab facility; I got put in a adolescent psychiatric unit for my detox. — Jack Osbourne

Because if you really want to die, I can put you under psychiatric observation." "I don't want to die," A.J. says after a bit. "I just find it difficult to be here all the time. Do you think I'm crazy? — Gabrielle Zevin

You'll know you've officially become sleep deprived when you have the unique feeling of being drunk, high, and on a psychiatric hold all at the same time. Some — Dawn Dais

The Maze is a painting of the inside of my skull, which I painted when I was in England as a patient in Maudsley and Netherne psychiatric hospitals. It is a story of my life, well in the sense that people tell stories by the fireplace to entertain their guests, trying to make them accept you. In this case I wanted to be accepted, as an interesting specimen. — William Kurelek

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus. — Ayelet Waldman

To become a fad, a psychiatric diagnosis requires 3 preconditions: a pressing need, an engaging story, and influential prophets. The pressing need arises from the fact that disturbed and disturbing kids are very often encountered in clinical, school, and correctional settings. They suffered and cause suffering to those around them - making themselves noticeable to families, doctors, and teachers. Everyone feels enormous pressure to do something. Previous diagnoses (especially conduct or oppositional disorder) provided little hope and no call to action. In contrast, a diagnosis or childhood Bipolar Disorder creates a justification for medication and for expanded school services. The medications have broad and nonspecific effects that are often helpful in reducing anger, even if the diagnosis is inaccurate. — Allen Frances

I think that we're making a mistake if we don't see that there is a cultural basis to many illnesses, not just psychiatric ones. Breast cancer would be one prevalent example right now, different kind of cultures surrounding it. If you don't understand the cultural meaning of an illness like that you're going to miss the boat even if you're a great scientist. — Jonathan Michel Metzl

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness. — Rollo May

The DSM-IV-TR is a 943-page textbook published by the American Psychiatric Association that sells for $99 ... There are currently 374 mental disorders. I bought the book ... and leafed through it ... I closed the manual. "I wonder if I've got any of the 374 mental disorders," I thought. I opened the manual again. And instantly diagnosed myself with twelve different ones. — Jon Ronson

Nations customarily measure the "costs of war" in dollars, lost production, or the number of soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms — Richard A. Gabriel

Retrospective epidemiological studies report that 20% of the general population qualifies for a current psychiatric diagnosis and 50% for a lifetime one.4 Prospective epidemiological studies double these rates and suggest that mental disorder is becoming virtually ubiquitous.5, 6 During the past — Allen Frances

If ever we needed in this country to adopt a new attitude towards homosexuality, this is the time. Instead of treating it as a crime, and driving it underground, we ought to recognize it for what it is: it's a mental illness, it's a psychiatric condition which ought to be treated sympathetically by psychiatrists and social workers. — Tommy Douglas

The categories used in psychiatric diagnosis are based on observation of signs and symptoms, rather than on pathological processes. One can make use of a few signs, such as facial expressions associated with depression or the flight of ideas associated with mania. But what clinicians mainly use for diagnosis are symptoms, the subject experiences reported by patients. Psychiatrists have little knowledge of the processes that lie behind these phenomena. Thus psychiatric diagnoses, with very few exceptions, are syndromes, not diseases. — Joel Paris

According to Goffman, the Wise are those people (often with a close personal relationship to a stigmatised individual, such as the wife of a psychiatric patient) who do not subscribe to the prejudicial and stigmatising behaviours prevalent throughout society and do not let the stigmatisable status of an individual cloud their judgment on such persons. They are often afforded honorary status as "one of us" within communities of stigmatised people, and in return help the stigmatised people pass for Normals (as such they can often spot an otherwise passing individual because they are familiar with techniques which are employed to this end). — Jenn Sims

As a boy, Picasso struggled with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Einstein was slow to talk and would apply picture thinking to complex problems in the field of physics. The dividing line between psychiatric disorders and great gifts is often a very narrow one and strongly depends on how someone is viewed by their surroundings. — Dick Swaab

Let me tell something, seeing your name and psychiatric ward on the same piece of paper isn't the best way to start your day. — Michael Thomas Ford

Those who reinforce the disintegrating elements in our society will get no thanks from future generations. The family becomes the ultimate victim of homosexuality, a result which any society can tolerate only within certain limits.

If the American Psychiatric Association endorses one of the symptoms of social distress as a normal phenomenon it demonstrates to the public its ignorance of social dynamics, of the relation of personal maladaptation to social disharmony, and thereby acquires a responsibility for aggravating the already existing chaos.
[response to December 15, 1973 verdict] — Abram Kardiner

ever growing body of evidence suggests that biology sets men and women apart in ways that have real consequences for mood and behavior - including their susceptibility to depression and other psychiatric disorders. — Scientific American

I've shot films in locations that have seemed haunted. I shot a film in a maximum-security prison in Russia. Part of it was on a psychiatric ward - there were definitely some creepy vibes there. — Norman Reedus

In a psychiatric hospital, a lot of people believe that people on TV are talking to them directly through the screen. I'm with about 500 of these people, and I'm on TV every Friday night. As I was queuing up for breakfast one morning, one guy nearly jumped out of his skin. My first thought was to go 'Woooo!' — Paul Merton

And all our gods are not lies. They existed. All our gods, from the beginning of time, have been men with psychiatric conditions. And their delusions were so deep, they passed them on. — Manu Joseph

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated. — Thomas Szasz

Meanwhile the doctor was saying, "The reason there are so many people on the river these days is because there are too many people everywhere else." Bonnie shivered, slipping into the crook of his left arm. "Why don't we build a fire?" she said. "The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness." He sipped at his bourbon and ice. "Soon there will be no place to go. Then the madness becomes universal." Another thought. "And the universe goes mad." "We — Edward Abbey

If dissociation, then, has been understood by psychopathologists to imply among other things 'loss of consciousness,' the question that immediately presents itself, or so one might think, is: what exactly is being lost--in other words, what is meant by consciousness? It turns out that it is exceedingly difficult to find an answer to this question in the psychiatric literature despite the seeming centrality of the issue. — Morton Klass

Exercise is the single most powerful tool you have to optimize your brain function ... exercise has a profound impact on cognitive abilities and mental health. It is simply one of the best treatments we have for most psychiatric problems. — John Ratey

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine. — Thomas Szasz

The psychiatric endeavor - voodoo, really - is premised on the medicalization of misconduct. — Ilana Mercer

And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance". However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally. — Robert Whitaker

Exorcists always need to distinguish demonic possessions from mental or psychiatric disorders, and they use three symptoms to identify people as possessed. First, those people have the ability to see hidden sacred objects, which they always want removed. Second, they have an extraordinary physical strength. And third, they show an aversion to the sacred — Gerard Verschuuren

Foods of the Gods") - "After water, cocoa is the single healthiest substance you can put in your mouth. It can easily replace a number of psychiatric drugs for mood, plus it produces the same chemistry in the brain that occurs when we fall in love. — Chris Kilham

Children who don't feel safe in infancy have trouble regulating their moods and emotional responses as they grow older. By kindergarten, many disorganized infants are either aggressive or spaced out and disengaged, and they go on to develop a range of psychiatric problems.23 They also show more physiological stress, as expressed in heart rate, heart rate variability,24 stress hormone responses, and lowered immune factors.25 Does this kind of biological dysregulation automatically reset to normal as a child matures or is moved to a safe environment? So far as we know, it does not. — Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

He told us that it was important to eat right, exercise, and treat your body as a temple. But he didn't tell us how to get health care services that people with no money could afford. He didn't tell us how we could quickly obtain birth control and other reproductive health services. He didn't recommend any solutions for behavioral or psychiatric care, and for sure some of those broads needed it. He didn't say what options there might be for people who had struggled with substance abuse, sometimes for decades, when they were confronted by old demons on the outside. — Piper Kerman

The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms. — Thomas Szasz

The evidence of grave emotional and mental suffering is clear to see in the growing number of mental health units, "re-habs" and overflowing psychiatric wards as people try to find relief in compulsive drinking, drug abuse, gambling, over-eating, under-eating, chasing prestige, hoarding money, "retail therapy" and over-indulging in pornography and sex. — Christopher Dines

Psychiatric diagnoses are considered to be technical and bounded; you are either in or out. In contrast, a biblical perspective puts many interpersonal differences on a continuum: people may have more or less of something. This is relevant to sins, spiritual gifts, weaknesses, and character qualities. — Edward T. Welch

Psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests. — Allen Frances

I wish I were a bird. I'd fly all the way up to the clouds and look down on this place, and then I'd go far away and never come back. — Jason Medina

Based on his own experience and the experiences of others he treated later in his psychiatric practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how to find meaning in it and move forward with renewed purpose. — Sophie Sabbage

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 am growing to hate the vague declarations of psychiatric treatment, the airy cross-your-fingers pronouncements. The treatment of mental health is an inexact science. But, as I am slowly coming to understand, depression is an inexact illness. — Sally Brampton

You tried so hard to give your kid food that was healthy, she thought. The soy cheese pizza. The organic peas and broccoli and baby carrots. The smoothies. The hormone-free milk. The leafy greens. You kept processed food to a minimum, threw Halloween candy out after a week. Never let him eat the icies they sold in the park, because they had red and yellow dye in them. And then you gave him this? — Sharon Guskin

The effect of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the user's experience and behavior depends in part on his or her personality and genetic predisposition, which can vary to a great extent from person to person. As symptoms of psychiatric disorders can sometimes be elicited after one-off use, people with a genetic tendency to depression or psychosis should be discouraged from using psychoactive mushrooms. — John Rush

The degree to which the psychiatric community is complicit with abusive parents in drugging non-compliant children is a war crime across the generations, and there will be a Nuremberg at some point in the future — Stefan Molyneux

For a long time I had wanted to take leave of Planet Tourism, to find one of those places that occasionally turn up in the middle pages of newspapers in far-flung cities, in which
we are told
a mad loner has been discovered who has lost all contact with the modern world. It seems inevitable that this desire will one day be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association as Robinson Crusoe Syndrome. — Lawrence Osborne

Having a parent incarcerated increases a child's chances of juvenile delinquency between 300 and 400 percent; it increases the odds of a serious psychiatric disorder by 250 percent. — Malcolm Gladwell

Case by case, we find that conformity is the easy way, and the path to privilege and prestige; dissidence carries personal costs that may be severe, even in a society that lacks such means of control as death
squads, psychiatric prisons, or extermination camps. The very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem. — Noam Chomsky

With psychiatric medications, you solve one problem for a period of time, but the next thing you know you end up with two problems. The treatment turns a period of crisis into a chronic mental illness. - Amy Upham (203) — Robert Whitaker

Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent ... and remarkably popular products and practices. — Thomas Szasz

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

Treatment Plans and Interventions for Depression and Anxiety Disorders provides clinicians with essential guidelines to treat patients in the era of managed care. Seven psychiatric disorders are described and conceptualized in cognitive-behavioral terms. The authors then provided an unusually clear, reader-friendly description of how to assess and treat each disorder with illustrative case examples, and patient forms and handouts. It should prove very useful for clinicians or clinicians-in-training who want to learn how to conduct short-term treatment through an empirically validated approach. — Judith S. Beck

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself. — Kate Millett

And the reason I really appreciated this is because after the picture came out, I was invited by the American Psychiatric Association to give a lecture. I couldn't believe it! — Rod Steiger

I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad ... he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help. — Boris Johnson

Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed. — Elyn Saks

Because I was in psychiatric treatment for most of my childhood and had to learn English and had to adjust to a white-dominated society, I truly know what being Sudanese refugees [adopting by white family] mean. It's not something that you can explain in the confines of an interview, but there is an immediate comfort, a connection between black phenotypes that is natural. — Kola Boof

I was in danger of having my children taken away from me when I needed five weeks in psychiatric care ... There is the smiling depressive which is the biggest time bomb and when they go they usually go with a bang, which was me ... — Trisha Goddard

We must urge a national dialogue on better methods of curbing preventable gun violence, and address the need for mental health awareness and access to psychiatric services in this country. — Charles B. Rangel

I don't understand if you get caught in a fight, but take it out on a room, how that implies some psychiatric disorder. — Sean Connery

She had read enough lives of the poetesses to know all about inpatient psychiatric care. — Nell Zink

According to the most outspoken and vituperative Skeptics, therapists specializing in recovered memory therapy operate in a neverland of fairy dust and mythic monsters. Woefully out of touch with modern research, engaging in "crude psychiatric analysis," guilty of oversimplification, overextension, and "incestuous opinion citing," these misguided, undertrained, and overzealous clinicians are implanting false memories in the minds of suggestible clients, making "therapeutic lifers" out of their patients and ripping families apart. This — Elizabeth F. Loftus

The dumping of the mentally ill, full of these new psychiatric drugs, into the streets is a scandal. It's been carried furthest in New York, where whole sections of the decayed Upper West Side are being filled with pensioners and psychotic patients on stelazine, lithium carbonate, and everything else under the sun. They can't diagnose the patient, so they give him the whole psychiatric pharmacopoeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals. — Kenneth Rexroth

Countries with the best-resourced medical services have the best outcomes for physical illness (it is better to have a heart attack in Washington or London than in rural Africa) whereas precisely the opposite is the case for mental illness (developing nations with limited psychiatric resources have better outcomes and lower suicide rates). — Richard Bentall

Studies show that neurotic and psychiatric disorders are more common among those who attempt to keep conscious control of life and suppress its unwelcome quirks. Sanity, paradoxically, may lie in accepting that you are not in control. — Michael Brooks

On the ward there was hurt and pain so big and so deep that speech could not express it. I had been interested in philosophy, and suddenly philosophy came alive for me, for here the basic questions of human existence were not abstractions: they were embodied in human suffering — Frank X. Barron

I laughed it off but I close the bedroom door and I lose it and I stick it all down here and this is where it all stays.
And this is where it has to stay because I am not ending up in the nutter ward again with brown walls, jigsaws, and people crying that their husbands left them, and men slamming their heads against walls, and Mum bringing me a mini trifle and a copy of Smash Hits like that would make everything better.
It didn't. It won't. It can't. Psychiatric wards when most of my mates were ... .I can't tell anyone what is going on ... Can't write ... Can't think about it.
Not even here. — Rae Earl

I want to talk about the difference between living and existing, and what it was like to be kept on an acute psychiatric ward for day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day etc. — Nathan Filer

Deep scientific psychoanalysis reveals that excessive beliefs and dependence on religion is a superstition and fear induced psychiatric disease. — Debasish Mridha

Even at this stage, my preparations were like strapping on a parachute in an airplane that was about to crash; the whole time I was preparing to hurl myself out the door, I clung to the hope that something would happen at the last minute to forestall that terrible necessity I felt-not hostility, as psychiatric texts would say, or vengeful rage, or a desire for attention. This was done in secret, out of a need to alleviate pain which was as implacable as thirst. — Tracy Thompson

Amanda had way too much time to think being at the hospital without any friends. She didn't want to dwell on her thoughts for too long lest the wrong ones might emerge. She was hoping to forget what happened to her. — Jason Medina

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. — Jeffrey K. Smith

And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse. — Jo Brand

Eccentricity is not a psychiatric disorder. — Bill Dedman

When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness. — Harriet Lerner

Ambien might have mentally just tossed my salad. WITH CROUTONS. — Jen Lancaster

I too searched far and wide for the cure to addiction, but my medical and psychiatric background did not lead me to the cure because the source of addiction does not lie here,. — Abraham J. Twerski

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a "significant precursor of suicide." The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. "Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection," they wrote, "a denial of one's most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience." Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared. — Matthew Desmond

When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War. — Robert Jay Lifton

I had a library of maybe 1,000 books in my room in Buenos Aires. I did have the sense that everything there was organised in the right way. You'll probably think I needed serious psychiatric treatment, but there were times when I would not buy a book because I knew it wouldn't fit one of the categories into which I had divided the library. — Alberto Manguel

Want me to come?" Tod ran his hand up my back, over my shirt. "If you keep her busy, I could convert the filing system from 'alphabetical' to 'most deserving of psychiatric help.'" He leaned closer, and I knew no one else would hear whatever came out of his mouth next. "I've been meaning to make some special notations in Nash's file anyway. Imagine the level of help he could receive if they knew the root of his recent academic decline was a deep-seated fear of the letter Q." I laughed. I couldn't help it. And though everyone else at the table looked curious, no one asked what Tod had said. They were finally starting to learn. "Thanks, but it's hard enough to take grief counseling seriously without you singing 'Living Dead Girl' at the top of your lungs behind the counselor's back. — Rachel Vincent

Maybe PTSD really is triggered by a single incident, a stressor, as it's known in the psychiatric community, and maybe the attack at Al-Waleed was that stressor for me, but as I have learned in the intervening years, I was not damaged by that moment alone. In fact, while there are specific memories that resurface with some frequency, like the suicide bomber in Sinjar or the order riot at Al-Waleed, I find myself most traumatized by the overall experience of being in a combat zone like Iraq, where you are always surrounded by war but rarely aware of when or how violence will arrive. Like so many of my fellow veterans, I understand now how that it is the daily adrenaline rush of a war without front lines or uniforms, rather than the infrequent bursts of bloody violence, that ultimately damages the modern warrior's mind. — Luis Carlos Montalvan

Neither he [Ferenczi] nor Freud believed that a person should be exempted from legal punishment
or worse, that he should be punished by compulsory psychiatric "treatments"
because of psychoanalytic information about him. In the light of current thought, this is a startling and sobering fact. — Thomas Szasz

I don't feel uncomfortable in forbidding institutions, and work with, say, prisons or psychiatric institutions could be one of the things that evolve out of the Laureateship. — Chris Riddell

The pressure to reduce health care costs is aimed only at the treatment of real diseases. There is no pressure to reduce the costs of treating fictitious diseases. On the contrary, there is pressure to define ever more types of undesirable behaviors as mental disorders or addictions and to spend ever more tax dollars on developing new psychiatric diagnoses and facilities for storing and treating the victims of such diseases, whose members now include alcoholics, drug abusers, smokers, overeaters, self-starvers, gamblers, etc. — Thomas Szasz

Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help. — Ken Livingstone

That is where we stand as a nation today. Twenty years ago, our society began regularly prescribing psychiatric drugs to children and adolescents, and now one out of every fifteen Americans enters adulthood with a "serious mental illness." That is proof of the most tragic sort that our drug-based paradigm of care is doing a great deal more harm than good. The medicating of children and youth became commonplace only a short time ago, and already it has put millions onto a path of lifelong illness. (246) — Robert Whitaker

Energy drinks like Red Bull may give you wings for the moment, but in time it takes away your basic physical and mental wellness and leads to disastrous psychiatric and physiological conditions. — Abhijit Naskar

I do not use psychiatric terms in my writing because the entrenched and developing behaviours were perfectly normal reactions to abnormal situations. — Jane Hersey

My mom worked as a psychiatric social worker. She was interested in people, and I guess I am, too. So we would talk about the people that we knew, and why they behaved the way they did. — Julianne Moore

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. — Robert Whitaker

The innermost core of the patient's personality is not even touched by a psychosis.
An incurably psychotic individual may lose his usefulness but yet retain the dignity of a human being. This is my psychiatric credo.
Without it I should not think it worthwhile to be a psychiatrist.
For whose sake? Just for the sake of a damaged brain machine which cannot be repaired? If the patient were not definitely more, euthanasia would be justified. — Viktor E. Frankl