Psychiatric Quotes

• Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.

  Thomas Szasz

  Addiction, Political, Anorexia

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• Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them.

  Peter Breggin

  Self, Drug, Understanding

  Peter Breggin, David Cohen (2007). “Your Drug May Be Your Problem, Revised Edition: How and Why to Stop Taking Psychiatric Medications”, p.94, Da Capo Press

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• 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

  Nurse, Abuse, Audience

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• In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.

  Peter Breggin

  Spiritual, Reality, Doe

  "The Hazards of Psychiatric Diagnosis" by Dr. Peter Breggin, www.huffingtonpost.com. June 21, 2010.

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• Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it

  Thomas Szasz

  Commitment, Slavery, Problem

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

  Kate Millett

  Character, Medicine, Odds

  Kate Millett (1990). “The Loony-bin Trip”, p.312, University of Illinois Press

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• We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

  Elyn Saks

  Motivation, Inspiration, Jail

  "A tale of mental illness — from the inside". TED Talk, www.ted.com. June, 2012.

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• We couldn't be making as much money, if we had to deal with stranger behaviour. And right now, anybody who slows down our economic productivity, off they go. We have a place for them, the psychiatric institution. That's the main thing, they slow things down.

  Chester Brown

  Behaviour, Stranger, Economic

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• Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

  Thomas Szasz

  Medicine, Experts, Mendacity

  Thomas Stephen Szasz (2004). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.162, Transaction Publishers

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• 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

  Voice, Numbers, Personality

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• What do you do when you don't know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.

  R. D. Laing

  Suicide, Wonder, Psychological

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

  William Sargant

  Jesus, Religion, Use

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• Homosexuality is a psychological and psychiatric disorder, there is no question about it. It is a purple menace that is threatening the proper design of gender distinctions in society.

  Charles W. Socarides

  Gay, Purple, Design

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• Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.

  Ken Livingstone

  House, Needs, Helping

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• If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.

  Alfred Korzybski

  Science, Would Be, Enquiry

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• Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.

  Thomas Szasz

  Children, Giving, Drug

  Thomas Szasz's remarks at the 35th Anniversary and Human Rights Award Dinner of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International at Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, California, www.szasz.com. February 28, 2004.

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• 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

  Pain, Airplane, Suicidal

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• I'm great at a deathbed. I've never given tranquillisers or psychiatric medicine. I've given love and fun and creativity and passion and hope, and these things ease suffering.

  Patch Adams

  Fun, Passion, Creativity

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry's view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.

  Ian Mcewan

  Lying, Thinking, Ideas

  Ian McEwan (2010). “Saturday”, p.17, Random House

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• I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently.

  Elyn Saks

  Schizophrenia, Psychiatric Hospitals, Hospitals

  "My life with schizophrenia" by Elyn Saks, www.cnn.com. August 12, 2012.

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• 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

  Practice, People, May

  Rollo May Ph.D. (1953). “Man's Search for Himself”

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• 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

  Lying, Addiction, Doe

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• Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.

  Francis Crick

  Believe, Years, Needs

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• Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.

  Emma Forrest

  Dream, Men, Brain

  Emma Forrest (2012). “Your Voice in My Head”, p.169, A&C Black

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• Psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests.

  Allen Frances

  Tests, Diagnosis, Judgment

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