Quotessence
Home / Topics / Psychiatry Quotes

Psychiatry Quotes

Browse 429 quotes about Psychiatry.

Related topics

PsychiatristPeopleIfsMedicineHumansMenPsychoanalysisPsychologyReligionThinkingWayDoctorsHelpingKindMeanPatientSocialBelieveGivingKnowsPersonsSelfYears

Psychiatry Quotes

“The same mental health experts also say that we should “fake it until you make it.” It is one of their attempts to reprogram what does not exist, to foolishly fool a supposedly foolish unconscious or subconscious mind.”

MindPhilosophyScienceBrainConsciousnessPsychologySubconsciousNeurosciencePsychiatry
Book:Beyond Machine Man: Who we really are and why Transhumanism is just an empty promise!
Create image

“Despite their complete lack of knowledge and understanding about the very basics of consciousness, Machine Man still insists with a religious fervor that is cloaked in the mantle of science that consciousness can only arise out of particles that have no consciousness.”

LifeMindPhilosophyScienceBrainConsciousnessPsychologyNeurosciencePsychiatry
Book:Beyond Machine Man: Who we really are and why Transhumanism is just an empty promise!
Create image

“Every part of the brain plays a crucial role in the construction of something magnificent which we call ”mind”. But if we observe closely, the mind doesn’t exactly exist as one distinct process or entity or system. It’s rather an illusion. We can understand this better if we see the mind as a nation. Think of the nation you live in. Is there really any such thing as a ”nation”! A nation is simply the collection of activities of a group of people inside an imaginary border. Likewise, mind is the collection of activities of a group of neurons inside the skull. And just like in a nation, when a few neurons malfunction, others can slowly learn to take their place. But when an entire group of neurons in a specific brain region malfunctions, it can impede in the proper functioning of the mind, just like when a huge number of people in an entire state or district stop working, it can affect the functioning of the entire nation.”

MindPsychologyBrainy QuotesHuman MindNeurosciencePsychiatryNeuropsychologyNeurologyNeurobiology
Book:Mission Reality
Create image

“Tim Kasser: ‘The heyday of humanistic psychology was in the 1960s and 1970s, when Keynes dominated. But since the rise of neo-liberalism from the 1980s, we’ve seen an influx of cognitive behavioural approaches and psychiatric drugs – technologies that put the cause of the problem right between your ears. The therapies our governments now want all focus on internal not external reform. They don’t see suffering as a call to change external circumstances for the good of our development.”

SufferingPsychologyCapitalismTherapyPsychiatryNeoliberalismKeynesCbt
Book:Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created our Mental Health Crisis
Create image

“Hva ville det egentlig si å være sinnssyk? Man kunne jo glatt vekk kalle hinannens særegenheter og mer eller mindre brysomme eiendommeligheter for sinnssykdom. Hvem kun hindre det? Én hadde aversjon for katter, en annen var ikke til å bevege til å foreta seg noe på en mandag, en tredje gikk ikke i seng uten først å sette skoene baklengs foran sovekammerdøren, en fjerde trodde på drømmer og lot seg påvirke av dem, en femte hadde talt med hedenfarne ånder og visste at han efter døden skulle komme i den niende himmel, en sjette hadde hatt en åpenbaring av apostelen Petrus, og av ham fått malt til å helbrede sykdommer ved håndspåleggelse, en syvende ble søvnløs av gremmelse over ikke å kunne få sitt arbeide til, en åttende følte seg så uskikket for jordelivet at han foretrakk godvillig å absentere seg, en niende hadde dårlig mave, og var som følge av det umulig å omgåes, en tiende drakk og foretok seg i fullskap de merkeligste og avskyeligste ting, en ellevte hadde motbydelighet for det annet kjønn, en tolvte kunne ikke tåle synet av barn, en trettende fikk stivkrampe når han kom i nærheten av rotter og mus, en fjortende var stormannsgal og bilte seg inn at han visste til punkt og prikke hva som skulle kalles sinnssykdom og hva ikke, og så fremdeles i det uendelige.”

SufferingHumanityPsychologyMedicineInsanityPsychiatryPsychiatristDoctorNormalitySinnssyk
Book:På St. Jørgen
Create image

“Against this catalog of social difficulties, we must keep in mind that AS involves a different kind of intelligence. The strong drive to systemize means that the person with AS becomes a specialist in something, or even in everything they delve into. One man with AS in Denmark who I met put it this way: “You people [without AS] are generalists, content to know a little bit about a lot of subjects. We people [with AS] are specialists. Once we start to explore a subject, we do not leave it until we have gathered as much information as we can.” In effect, the systemizing drive in AS is often a drive to identify the underlying structure in the world.”

EmpathyAutismPsychiatryAspergers SyndromeSystemizing
Book:The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
Create image

“Seeking for perfection is like seeking for mental health without a definition of what it is. But if psychology and psychiatry are as lost as the people they consistently evaluate, and people are as imperfect as the imperfection they see in others, then I have to conclude that it is as wise to accept judgment as it is to judge first the ones who judge us. But it is also as wise as it is foolish to do so; for it is like seeking for a definition that can’t entirely define us. Because if one answer can explain a thousand questions, a billion questions would never amount to the importance of an answer, which the simpler it is, the more questions it answers. And in that sense, I must say, we are imperfectly perfect.”

PsychologyLonelinessDepressionPerfectionAngerMental HealthPsychiatryPerfectionismSelfesteem
Author:Robin Sacredfire
Create image

“My contention is that the psychiatric perspective on homosexuality is but a thinly disguised replica of the religious perspective which it displaced, and that efforts to 'treat' this kind of conduct medically are but thinly disguised methods for suppressing it.”

SinHomosexualityPsychiatryViceMedicalization
Book:The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement
Create image

“Just as the capacity for experiencing fatigue has evolved to protect us from overexertion, the capacity for sadness may have evolved to prevent additional losses. Maladaptive extremes of anxiety, sadness, and other emotions make more sense when we understand their evolutionary origins and normal, adaptive functions.”

LifeHistoryHealthTheoryEvolutionDiseaseSicknessPsychiatry
Book:Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine
Create image

“It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment-the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling-seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic.”

HealthDoctorsInsanityTherapyPsychiatryMisdiagnosis
Author:David L. Rosenhan
Create image

“Our desires, dreams and hopes, open portals. These portals manifest in our conscience and five senses, in the form of decisions related to the material world but also opportunities. Now, at the exact same time, or maybe even slightly before in time, we get the exact opposite, the temptation, the illusion and deception. And when we are about to make a decision, as if by magic, the two things come stronger to us, as if pushing us into a duality that makes it hard to decide. Now, this brings me to another super interesting fact: Most people assume that they have freewill, and that choices are hard to be made, and that life is full of dualities. And I've learned that this is just a great deception related to our planet, which, as human beings, we must transcend. And what I'm really saying here is that the duality and the freewill don't exist. There's only one choice to be made, the one that bring us upwards. Self-destruction is not a choice. And yet, every duality presents exactly that, and not really a choice.”

LifeReligionChoicesSpiritualityLeadershipPsychologySelf ImprovementDecisionsDogmaPsychiatryAlchemy
Author:Robin Sacredfire
Create image

“Standing on the edge with my patients — abiding with them — means that I must harbor a true awareness that I, too, could lose my child through the play of circumstance over which I have no control. I could lose my home, my financial security, my safety. I could lose my mind. Any of us could.”

LossAwarenessSecurityParentsChildPsychiatry
Book:Falling Into the Fire: A Psychiatrist's Encounters with the Mind in Crisis
Create image

“Of course. A new consciousness - I that that is the word,' said the old man after he had thought a moment. 'That is what I hope it is. You and your African and Colombian, you are speaking the same language now, you know the same ideas. You are conscious that life on earth is flux. Men are better educated. They are more disciplined than in the past - their schedules are harder, their lives move faster, efficiency digs into them. Men are more sophisticated -every day they have more alternatives to choose among than they can possibly exhaust. Through psychiatry they know their strengths and weaknesses. They know the risks of every choice. This is what I mean by consciousness. Men know so much about everything they do. It was much simpler when they didn't know, when they simply acted out of instinct, believed from instinct, loved from instinct, brought up children by their instincts. Perhaps people were even happier. But now we are more conscious. We have got to live with our greater knowledge. We have got to live with our greater freedom.”

BeliefConsciousnessKnowledgeMankindPsychiatryModern Society
Book:The Tiber was Silver
Create image

“Life decisions—making too many and/or making them too easily is as dangerous as not making them at all. How clearly mania and depression outline the extremes of the dilemma of us all before the terrible fact of choice: indecisiveness in depression—nothing can be done; overdecisiveness in mania—everything is to be done and nothing gets done. We are doomed to choose, Sartre said, yet we don’t know when to choose and when not to choose.”

DepressionDecisionsChoiceExistentialPsychiatryManiaSartre
Book:The Concepts of Psychiatry: A Pluralistic Approach to the Mind and Mental Illness
Create image

“Theirs was the eternal youth of an alternating self, a youth with the constant although unfulfilled promise of growing up”

HealingAbuseMental HealthRecoverySexual AbusePsychiatryDissociative Identity DisorderDissociationPsychotherapyAmnesiaMultiplicityMultiple PersonalitiesDissociative AmnesiaMpdFugue
Book:Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities
Create image

“At its worst, the purpose of a psych ward is to normalize you back into a community that is anything but. Its purpose is not to heal you, but to make you stay sick so that you can function alongside the lies of a country steeped in them, so you can function alongside the lies you are forced to tell about yourself. We are all doubling in order to live, and the psych ward tells you to squash that inner knowing. It's simply not useful if you hope to thrive. At its best, psychiatric care gives you tools to let your inner knowing walk alongside the insanity of the world and create survival tools to trust what you know and survive the gaslighting and discrimination that seeks to burn down your house.”

HealingRecoveryConformityTransitionPsychiatryRepressionNormalityMalpracticePsych WardMedical Abuse
Book:Becoming a Man: The Story of a Transition
Create image

“On Prozac, Sisyphus might well push the boulder back up the mountain with more enthusiasm and creativity. I do not want to deny the benefits of psychoactive medication. I just want to point out that Sisyphus is not a patient with a mental health problem. To see him as a patient with a mental health problem is to ignore certain larger aspects of his predicament connected to boulders, mountains, and eternity.”

PsychologyDepressionPsychiatry
Author:Carl Elliott
Create image

“Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach.”

PsychologyPsychiatry
Book:The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Create image

“A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure.”

PsychologyAnalysisPsychiatryPsychiatristPsychologistPathologyAlienist Doctor
Book:The Shadowy Third
Create image

“Neuroscience is Poetry (Sonnet 2717) Human brain is the most astonishing transdimensional engineering of Mother Nature, from outside it's just a 3 pound lump of goop, but inside, the very fabric of spacetime bursts into existence - we stretch time when we suffer, we compress time when we're joyful, we expand space in empathy, we collapse distance through memory - we invent gods when we feel helpless, we invent weapons when we're scared, we invent poetry when we're inspired, we invent politics when we want control - in short, the human brain is bigger on the inside than the outside.”

ConsciousnessPsychologyPerceptionNeuroscienceEvolutionary PsychologyPsychiatryCognitionHuman BrainNeurologyNeurobiology
Book:Nazmahal: Palace of Grace
Create image