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Neel Burton

Neel Burton Quotes

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Famous Neel Burton Quotes

“A more fundamental problem with labelling human distress and deviance as mental disorder is that it reduces a complex, important, and distinct part of human life to nothing more than a biological illness or defect, not to be processed or understood, or in some cases even embraced, but to be ‘treated’ and ‘cured’ by any means possible—often with drugs that may be doing much more harm than good. This biological reductiveness, along with the stigma that it attracts, shapes the person’s interpretation and experience of his distress or deviance, and, ultimately, his relation to himself, to others, and to the world. Moreover, to call out every difference and deviance as mental disorder is also to circumscribe normality and define sanity, not as tranquillity or possibility, which are the products of the wisdom that is being denied, but as conformity, placidity, and a kind of mediocrity.”

WisdomMadnessMental HealthMental IllnessMeaningConformitySanityPsychiatryStigmaMental DisorderDevianceBiological Reductiveness
Book:The Meaning of Madness
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“Solitude removes us from the mindless humdrum of everyday life into a higher consciousness which reconnects us with ourselves and our deepest humanity, and also with the natural world, which quickens into our muse and companion. By setting aside dependent emotions and constraining compromises, we free ourselves up for problem solving, creativity, and spirituality. If we can embrace it, this opportunity to adjust and refine our perspectives creates the strength and security for still greater solitude and, in time, the substance and meaning that guards against loneliness.”

LonelinessSolitudeMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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“Ultimately, loneliness is not the experience of lacking but the experience of living. It is part and parcel of the human condition, and, unless a person is resolved, it can only be a matter of time before it resurfaces, often with a vengeance. On this account, loneliness is the manifestation of the conflict between our desire for meaning and the absence of meaning from the universe, an absence that is all the more glaring in modern societies which have sacrificed traditional and religious structures of meaning on the thin altar of truth.”

ReligionLonelinessSolitudeMythMeaningExistentialism
Book:For Better For Worse: Should I Get Married?
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