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Psychiatric Quotes

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Psychiatric Quotes

“The distinction between diseases of "brain" and "mind," between "neurological" problems and "psychological" or "psychiatric" ones, is an unfortunate cultural inheritance that permeates society and medicine. It reflects a basic ignorance of the relation between brain and mind. Diseases of the brain are seen as tragedies visited on people who cannot be blamed for their condition, while diseases of the mind, especially those that affect conduct and emotion, are seen as social inconveniences for which sufferers have much to answer. Individuals are to be blamed for their character flaws, defective emotional modulation, and so on; lack of willpower is supposed to be the primary problem.”

MindCharacterBrainMental HealthMental IllnessPsychologicalPsychiatricMental DisorderCharacter FlawsNeurological
Book:Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
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“Janna knew - Rikki knew — and I knew, too — that becoming Dr Cameron West wouldn't make me feel a damn bit better about myself than I did about being Citizen West. Citizen West, Citizen Kane, Sugar Ray Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Robinson miso, miso soup, black bean soup, black sticky soup, black sticky me. Yeah. Inside I was still a fetid and festering corpse covered in sticky blackness, still mired in putrid shame and scorching self-hatred. I could write an 86-page essay comparing the features of Borderline Personality Disorder with those of Dissociative Identity Disorder, but I barely knew what day it was, or even what month, never knew where the car was parked when Dusty would come out of the grocery store, couldn't look in the mirror for fear of what—or whom—I'd see. ~ Dr Cameron West describes living with DID whilst studying to be a psychologist.”

PsychologySelf EsteemAbuseShameMental HealthMemoryTraumaMental IllnessSurvivorChild AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderPsychologistDiagnosisDissociationChild Sexual AbuseMultiple Personality DisorderIncestPsychiatricMultiple PersonalitiesMental Health StigmaSplit PersonalityAbusive ParentsPedophilesDidSelf BlameSurvivor Of AbuseChild Range
Book:First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple
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“As a therapist, I have many avenues in which to learn about DID, but I hear exactly the opposite from clients and others who are struggling to understand their own existence. When I talk to them about the need to let supportive people into their lives, I always get a variation of the same answer. "It is not safe. They won't understand." My goal here is to provide a small piece of that gigantic puzzle of understanding. If this book helps someone with DID start a conversation with a supportive friend or family member, understanding will be increased.”

PainUnderstandingGoalSupportPsychologySafeNormalSafetyMental HealthTraumaMental IllnessDissociative Identity DisorderMultiplicityMultiple Personality DisorderUnsafePsychiatricPuzzleMpdPiece
Book:The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook
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“Having DID is, for many people, a very lonely thing. If this book reaches some people whose experiences resonate with mine and gives them a sense that they aren't alone, that there is hope, then I will have achieved one of my goals. A sad fact is that people with DID spend an average of almost seven years in the mental health system before being properly diagnosed and receiving the specific help they need. During that repeatedly misdiagnosed and incorrectly treated, simply because clinicians fail to recognize the symptoms. If this book provides practicing and future clinicians certain insight into DID, then I will have accomplished another goal. Clinicians, and all others whose lives are touched by DID, need to grasp the fundamentally illusive nature of memory, because memory, or the lack of it, is an integral component of this condition. Our minds are stock pots which are continuously fed ingredients from many cooks: parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, teachers, schoolmates, strangers, acquaintances, radio, television, movies, and books. These are the fixings of learning and memory, which are stirred with a spoon that changes form over time as it is shaped by our experiences. In this incredibly amorphous neurological stew, it is impossible for all memories to be exact. But even as we accept the complex of impressionistic nature of memory, it is equally essential to recognize that people who experience persistent and intrusive memories that disrupt their sense of well-being and ability to function, have some real basis distress, regardless of the degree of clarity or feasibility of their recollections. We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self.”

PsychologyAbuseMental HealthMemoryTraumaMental IllnessSurvivorChild AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderDiagnosisDissociationChild Sexual AbuseMultiple Personality DisorderIncestPsychiatricMental Health StigmaAbusive ParentsPedophilesDidChild Range
Book:First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple
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“We must understand that those who experience abuse as children, and particularly those who experience incest, almost invariably suffer from a profound sense of guilt and shame that is not meliorated merely by unearthing memories or focusing on the content of traumatic material. It is not enough to just remember. Nor is achieving a sense of wholeness and peace necessarily accomplished by either placing blame on others or by forgiving those we perceive as having wronged us. It is achieved through understanding, acceptance, and reinvention of the self. At this point in time there are people who question the validity of the DID diagnosis. The fact is that DID has its own category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders because, as with all psychiatric conditions, a portion of society experiences a cluster of recognizable symptoms that are not better accounted for by any other diagnosis.”

PsychologyAbuseMental HealthTraumaMental IllnessChild AbuseDissociative Identity DisorderDiagnosisDissociationChild Sexual AbuseMultiple Personality DisorderIncestPsychiatricMental Health StigmaDid
Book:First Person Plural: My Life as a Multiple
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“Why do I take a blade and slash my arms? Why do I drink myself into a stupor? Why do I swallow bottles of pills and end up in A&E having my stomach pumped? Am I seeking attention? Showing off? The pain of the cuts releases the mental pain of the memories, but the pain of healing lasts weeks. After every self-harming or overdosing incident I run the risk of being sectioned and returned to a psychiatric institution, a harrowing prospect I would not recommend to anyone. So, why do I do it? I don't. If I had power over the alters, I'd stop them. I don't have that power. When they are out, they're out. I experience blank spells and lose time, consciousness, dignity. If I, Alice Jamieson, wanted attention, I would have completed my PhD and started to climb the academic career ladder. Flaunting the label 'doctor' is more attention-grabbing that lying drained of hope in hospital with steri-strips up your arms and the vile taste of liquid charcoal absorbing the chemicals in your stomach. In most things we do, we anticipate some reward or payment. We study for status and to get better jobs; we work for money; our children are little mirrors of our social standing; the charity donation and trip to Oxfam make us feel good. Every kindness carries the potential gift of a responding kindness: you reap what you sow. There is no advantage in my harming myself; no reason for me to invent delusional memories of incest and ritual abuse. There is nothing to be gained in an A&E department.”

PainMemoriesHealingAttentionCuttingAbuseVictimMental HealthTraumaAlcoholMental IllnessPsychologicalSurvivorDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationMultiple Personality DisorderIncestSelf HarmRitual AbusePsychiatricAlter PersonalitiesDissociativeOverdoseSplit PersonalityAlcoholicEmergencySuicide AttemptAlters
Book:Today I'm Alice: Nine Personalities, One Tortured Mind
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“The data on organised abuse has been simplified or distorted in an attempt force it to conform to mechanical psychological models of dissociative obedience or else to the psychiatric framework of ‘paedophilia’. Psychopathology alone is an inadequate explanation for environments in which sexual abuse has a social and symbolic function for groups of adults. Abusive groups do not emerge in a vacuum but rather they are formed within pre-existing social arrangements such as families, churches and schools.”

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Book:Organised Sexual Abuse
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“As an undergraduate student in psychology, I was taught that multiple personalities were a very rare and bizarre disorder. That is all that I was taught on ... It soon became apparent that what I had been taught was simply not true. Not only was I meeting people with multiplicity; these individuals entering my life were normal human beings with much to offer. They were simply people who had endured more than their share of pain in this life and were struggling to make sense of it.”

PainPsychologyNormalMental HealthTraumaMental IllnessMentalBizarreDissociative Identity DisorderMultiplicityStudentMultiple Personality DisorderPsychiatricUndergraduateMpd
Book:The Dissociative Identity Disorder Sourcebook
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“Working to restore our voice with members of our first family can be a terrific learning experience. We didn't choose these difficult folks, but, as adults, how we talk to them is up to us. Observing and changing our part in family conversations is one royal road to change. In other words, if you can learn to speak clearly and to respond in a new way with your difficult mother or sister, then other relationships will be a piece of cake.”

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Book:The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You're Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate
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“We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.”

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Book:The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs
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“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.”

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Author:Kenneth Rexroth
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“Depression has been called the worlds number one public health problem. In fact, depression is so widespread it is considered the common cold of psychiatric disturbances. But there is a grim difference between depression and a cold. Depression can kill you.”

WorldHas BeensFactsProblemDifferencesCommonNumbersColdGrimPublic HealthDisturbancePsychiatricHealth ProblemsPostpartum DepressionCommon ColdEconomic Depression
Book:Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy
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“One year, I'd completely lost my bearings trying to follow potty training instruction from a psychiatric expert. I was stuck on step on, which stated without an atom of irony: "Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child." . . . I knew it only could have been written by someone whose suit coat was still spotless at the end of the day, not someone who had any hands-on experience with an actual two-year-old.”

TryingYearsChildrenHas BeensStillsTwoEndsHandsLostStepsWrittenTrainingStuckSuitsIronyExpertsThe End Of The DayRemoveTwo YearsAtomsInstructionCoatsCould Have BeenStubbornnessPsychiatricTwo Year OldsPottyHands On Experience
Author:Mary Blakely
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“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.”

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Author:Richard M. Weaver
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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.”

NeedsDoneWholeHappensPainLastsDesireFeltSecretAttentionDoorsMinutesStageTerribleRagePreparationAirplaneCrashThirstPreparingSuicidalHostilityAlleviateLast MinutePsychiatricParachutesVengeful
Author:Tracy Thompson
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“As a conscientious objector I did my community service in 1971 in a psychiatric hospital and a friend there, who also was a guitar player, invited me one day to join him recording film music with a band named Kraftwerk which I didn't know at the time. I came along and jammed at this session together with Ralf Hütter and a drummer (I believe his name was Charly Weiß). Florian Schneider and Klaus Dinger were present as listeners and everybody liked the spontaneous music we did together.”

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Author:Michael Rother
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“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.”

KnowsMeanBlackNaturalWhiteChildhoodComfortConnectionsInterviewsTreatmentRefugeeAdoptingPsychiatric
Author:Kola Boof
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“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).”

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Author:Richard Bentall
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“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.”

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Author:Jonathan Michel Metzl
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“Following the school shootings, Hillary and Tipper Gore, as well as their husbands, got together for the first White House conference on mental health. Because of her interest in mental health and her own problem with anti-depressants, Tipper had been made the expert, the psychiatric consultant to the president, duly designated.”

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Author:Peter Breggin
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