Schizophrenic Patient Quotes & Sayings

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic. — R.D. Laing

A schizophrenic is a person who already has a natural tendency to absent himself from this world, until some factor, sometimes serious, sometimes superficial, depending on the individual circumstances, forces him to create his own reality. It can develop into a state of complete alienation, what we call catatonia, but people do occasionally recover, at least enough to allow the patient to work and lead a near-normal life. It all depends on one thing: environment. — Paulo Coelho

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

Even when the [schizophrenic] patient is striving to tell us, in as clear and straightforward a way as he knows how, the nature of his anxieties and his experiences, structured as they are in a radically different way from ours, the speech content is necessarily difficult to follow. Moreover, the formal elements of speech are in themselves ordered in unusual ways, and these formal peculiarities seem, at least to some extent, to be the reflection in language of the alternative ordering of his experience, with splits in it where we take coherence for granted, and the running together (confusion) of elements that we keep apart. — R.D. Laing

I tell patients that tranquilizers alone never cure anyone. They merely reduce the intensity of the symptoms and make life slightly more endurable. They create a better behaved, chronic dependent person. Only with orthomolecular treatment can the majority of schizophrenic patients hope to become well and normally independent. — Abram Hoffer

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic. — R.D. Laing