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Psychopathology Quotes

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Psychopathology Quotes

“The starting point is recognizing that selection has shaped powerful mechanisms to protect against starvation. During a famine, those mechanisms motivate animals to get food -any food- eat it quickly, and eat more than usual, because food supplies are obviously erratic. The system also adjusts the body weight set point upward because extra fat stores are valuable when food sources are unreliable. And, as noted already, weight loss slows down metabolism, which is appropriate when a person is starving but the opposite of what is needed when trying to lose weight. Also, intermittent access to food signals unreliable access to food supplies, so it increases food intake and bingeing, even in rats.”

WomenEating DisordersAnorexiaBulimiaPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchRegulation Mechanisms
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Oh, sure, one can overdo it, and our history is darkly stained with abortive religious movements inspired by messianic crackpots. But it appears to be a continuum: too much and you end up in the realm of a Jim Jones, David Koresh, or Charles Manson, all of whom were able to lead others into a maelstrom of paranoid delusion. In the cases of Jones and Koresh, one can only do armchair forensic psychiatry to try to guess their afflictions, but Manson, alive and well, is a diagnosed schizophrenic. However, if you get the metamagical thoughts and behaviors to the right extent and at the right time and place, then people might just get the day off from work on your birthday for a long time to come.”

JesusChristMadnessMental IllnessMessiahHolidaysPsychopathologyShamanJim JonesDavid Koresh
Book:The Trouble with Testosterone and Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament
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“We know that chronic high stress levels contribute to mental and physical disorders in later life; however, this process does not necessarily inhibit reproduction, and thus the cycle is perpetuated unless the environment changes as natural selection does not select for happiness, but only for survival and reproduction.”

LonelinessStressEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“Female reproductive life history is linked to cardiovascular, metabolic, inflammatory and endocrine alterations to physiology in ways that have not only short-term but also long-term and, in some cases, permanent effects.”

LonelinessStressEvolutionary PsychologyAnorexiaBulimiaPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryTcaNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“In contemporary developed countries, loneliness has been described as an epidemic caused by the loss of traditional social connectivity and a reliance on technology. Therefore, it seems likely that the Alzheimer's disease risk factors of social isolation and loneliness were less prevalent in the past.”

LonelinessEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“In good times, when material resources are abundant and women have plentiful social support, maternal negativity has little place in the lives of women. However, in times of scarcity and/or when women are unsupported, negative feelings can emerge to color the emotional palette and behavior of mothers.”

LonelinessMotherhoodEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyMaternityEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“The standard model of schooling in which 20 or more young people of the same age are taught in classrooms for about 5 hours a day on most days of the year for 10 years certainly runs counter some of our evolved behavioral strategies.”

LonelinessEvolutionary PsychologyAdhdPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“From the perspective of life history theory, a speeded-up metabolism, less trust, less relaxation and more suspicion and risk-taking might be adaptive for abusive homes or violent neighborhoods. In such environments there is little emotional security or expectation that things will work out well.”

ViolenceLonelinessEvolutionary PsychologyCriminalityPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“It is also important to note that not all pathological presentations are caused by the environment. A child may have underlying difficulties such as intellectual disabilities or other neurodevelopmental disorders. On the other hand, just because a child has survived unscathed does not mean that the environment was benign. We know that some children are naturally less sensitive to environmental influences and as such are more resilient to harsh environments.”

LonelinessEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“Humans can survive in a wide range of physical environments, from the Arctic to rainforests to the Sahara. They can also survive in a wide range of emotional environments, from loving to neglectful to violent ones.”

LoveLonelinessBroken HeartEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyEvolutionary PsychiatryNeuropathology
Book:Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
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“Controlled mentalization, identification and understanding of emotional reactions, and emotional regulation are significant problems for eating-disordered patients. In general, bulimia nervosa patients show problems in emotional hyperarousal and flooding. The opposite, a dominance of detached and flattened effect, is typically seen in patients with anorexia nervosa.”

PsychologyFoodEatingDietEating DisorderBulimiaFatBingePsychopathologyPurging
Book:Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
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“…interoceptive confusion and body image distortions are forms of impaired embodied mentalizing and expressions of pre-mentalistic thinking. For example, psychic equivalence demonstrates how patients’ painful self and affect states are expressed though extreme body hatred and the mistaken belief that being “skinny” will bring them self-acceptance, "confidence," and agency. The teleological stance explains the obsessive drive for thinness as a method to obtain self-acceptance and the approval of others. In short, subjugation of the body is a confused attempt to gain mastery and control over feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of self-worth.”

PsychologyFoodEatingDietEating DisorderBulimiaFatBingePsychopathologyPurging
Book:Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
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“Hypermentalization, frequently seen in patients with bulimia nervosa, is when the patient is so outer-directed that she is prone to obsessively interpreting others' minds but not in an accurate way. Hypermentalized fantasies about another's mind is an effort to meet and satisfy that person's perceived desires and needs (Buhl, 2002; Skarderud, 2007), and based on inaccurate interpretations of self/other mental states because of attachment anxieties. Similarly, pseudo-mentalizing is when the patient appears to be expressing or talking about feelings and thoughts, but the narrative lacks emotional connection. instead, words and expressions are empty of meaning and serve to defend against feelings of worthlessness, insignificance, or desolation (Skarderud & Fonagy, 2012).”

PsychologyFoodEatingDietEating DisorderBulimiaFatBingePsychopathologyPurging
Book:Psychoanalytic Treatment of Eating Disorders
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“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about waht other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”

PsychologySelf EsteemDepressionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyLow Status
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about what other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”

PsychologySelf EsteemDepressionEvolutionary PsychologyPsychopathologyLow Status
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Under the heading of "defense mechanisms,” psychoanalysis describes a number of ways in which a person becomes alienated from himself. For example, repression, denial, splitting, projection, introjection. These "mechanisms" are often described in psychoanalytic terms as themselves "unconscious,” that is, the person himself appears to be unaware that he is doing this to himself. Even when a person develops sufficient insight to see that "splitting", for example, is going on, he usually experiences this splitting as indeed a mechanism, an impersonal process, so to speak, which has taken over and which he can observe but cannot control or stop. There is thus some phenomenological validity in referring to such "defenses" by the term "mechanism.” But we must not stop there. They have this mechanical quality because the person as he experiences himself is dissociated from them. He appears to himself and to others to suffer from them. They seem to be processes he undergoes, and as such he experiences himself as a patient, with a particular psychopathology. But this is so only from the perspective of his own alienated experience. As he becomes de-alienated he is able first of all to become aware of them, if he has not already done so, and then to take the second, even more crucial, step of progressively realizing that these are things he does or has done to himself. Process becomes converted back to praxis, the patient becomes an agent.”

Mental HealthRecoveryAgencyAlienationPsychopathologyDefense Mechanisms
Book:The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise
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“The term psychopathic state is the name we apply to those individuals who conform to a certain intellectual standard, sometimes high, sometimes approaching the realm of defect but yet not amounting to it, who throughout their lives, or from a comparatively early age, have exhibited disorders of conduct of an antisocial or asocial nature, usually of a recurrent or episodic type, who, in many instances, have proved difficult to influence by methods of social, penal, and medical care and treatment and for whom we have no adequate provision of a preventive or curative nature. The inadequacy or deviation or failure to adjust to ordinary social life is not mere willfulness or badness which can be threatened or thrashed out of the individual so involved, but constitutes a true illness for which we have no specific explanation.”

Mental IllnessPsychiatryPsychopathologyPsychopathsPersonality Disorders
Book:Psychopathic States
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“Criminalization and interdiction have filled prisons and corrupted governments in country after country. However, increasingly potent drugs that can be synthetized in any basement make controlling access increasingly impossible. Legalization seems like a good idea but causes more addiction. Our strongest defense is likely to be education, but scare stories make kids want to try drugs. Every child should learn that drugs take over the brain and turn some people into miserable zombies and that we have no way to tell who will get addicted the fastest. They should also learn that the high fades as addiction takes over.”

MalesAddictionAlcoholDrugsPsychopathologySubstance AbuseEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchNarcosCriminal Gangs
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Most chemicals that give humans a buzz evolved to disrupt insect nervous systems. If our brains used different chemicals, we would not be so vulnerable. However, we have common ancestors with insects. It was long ago, about 500 million years ago, when our ancestors split off from the arthropod lines that became modern insects. However, our neurochemicals remain about the same as theirs. Fortunately, most plant neurotoxins don’t kill us. We have evolved to eat plants, and we are much larger than insects, so low doses are not fatal. But drugs can hijack our motivation mechanisms and take control of our lives.”

MalesAddictionAlcoholDrugsPsychopathologySubstance AbuseEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchNarcosCriminal Gangs
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“The trajectory is clear: our minds have always been vulnerable to capture by alcohol, marijuana, tobacco, coca, and opium, but problems with them have escalated as advances in chemistry, transportation, and technology have increased the diversity, purity, and availability of drugs. The mismatch was bad before; now it’s getting much worse.”

MalesAddictionAlcoholDrugsPsychopathologySubstance AbuseEvolutionary PsychiatryMismatchNarcosCriminal Gangs
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“The 16 characteristics of psychopaths: 1. Intelligent 2. Rational 3. Calm 4. Unreliable 5. Insincere 6. Without shame or remorse 7. Having poor judgment 8. Without capacity for love 9. Unemotional 10. Poor insight 11. Indifferent to the trust or kindness of others 12. Overreactive to alcohol 13. Suicidal 14. Impersonal sex life 15. Lacking long-term goals 16. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior”

Mental IllnessPsychiatryPsychopathPsychopathologyPsychopathic PersonalitiesPsychiatric CriteriaThe Mask Of Sanity
Book:The Mask of Sanity
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“Psychopathic individuals have a neurobiologic impairment in the ability to recognize and process fear and sadness in the facial expressions or voices of other people. It's as though they're blind and deaf to the pain of those around them.”

PsychiatryPsychopathologyNeurobiologyPsychopathic PersonalitiesHarvard PsychiatryJordan Smoller
Book:The Other Side of Normal: How Biology Is Providing the Clues to Unlock the Secrets of Normal and Abnormal Behavior – A Fascinating Exploration of What Makes Us Human
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“Her parents, she said, has put a pinball machine inside her head when she was five years old. The red balls told her when she should laugh, the blue ones when she should be silent and keep away from other people; the green balls told her that she should start multiplying by three. Every few days a silver ball would make its way through the pins of the machine. At this point her head turned and she stared at me; I assumed she was checking to see if I was still listening. I was, of course. How could one not? The whole thing was bizarre but riveting. I asked her, What does the silver ball mean? She looked at me intently, and then everything went dead in her eyes. She stared off into space, caught up in some internal world. I never found out what the silver ball meant.”

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Book:An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
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“I especially liked it when, at the end, they begged for their lives. When they did that—and they all did that eventually—I would pretend to hesitate and see in their eyes the glimmer of a final, desperate hope. I let them have that for an instant. Then, I took it away. That—that extinguishing of their very last hope—I savored more than anything, even more than the extinguishing of their lives. You see, it was at that moment they could feel the presence of the Devil and would beg God to come and deliver them from him. And it was in that moment that I made them see—that they finally realized—God had been there all along. It was then they understood: the Devil was just God in his night attire.”

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Book:The Devil Aspect
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“The main evolutionary explanation for the obesity epidemic is obvious; the mechanism that regulate body weight are poorly suited for our modern environments. Taking your body into a modern grocery store is like taking your computed into the summer sun. The environment is outside the range that the control mechanisms can cope with. Our environment is so different from the one we evolved in that it’s remarkable that anyone eats normally. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked miles each day gathering food and hunting game, eager to satisfy hunger with whatever they could find. The food they found was mainly high-fiber fruits and vegetables and lean fish and meat. That was only a few thousand years ago, less for many populations.”

Evolutionary PsychologyAnorexiaEating DisorderBulimiaPsychopathologyBinge EatingTca
Book:Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
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“Has a festival of atrocity films ever been held? Every year at the Oscars ceremony, some might say. It seemed likely in the late 60s, but the new puritans of our day would greet such a suggestion with a shudder. A pity - given the unlimited opportunities which the media landscape now offers to the wayward imagination, I feel we should immerse ourselves in the most destructive element, ourselves, and swim. I take it that the final destination of the 20th century, and the best we can hope for in the circumstances, is the attainment of a moral and just psychopathology.”

PsychopathologyPuritanismOscars CeremonyAtrocity Films
Book:The Atrocity Exhibition
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“Among [Applewhite's] other teachings was the classic cult specialty of developing disdain for anyone outside of the Heaven's Gate commune. Applewhite flattered his would-be alien flock that they were an elite elect far superior to the non-initiated humans whom he considered to be deluded zombies.[...]Applewhite effectively fed his paranoid persecution complex to his followers to ensure blind loyalty to the group and himself while fostering alienation from the mundane world. This paradoxical superior/fearful attitude towards “Them” (i.e., anyone who is not one of “Us”) is one of the simplest means of hooking even the most skeptical curiosity seeker into the solipsistic netherworld of a [mentally unbalanced] leader's insecure and threatened worldview.”

SociologySectsPsychopathologyCultsMass SuicidesReligious Science Fiction
Book:Straight to Hell: 20th Century Suicides
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“For the sake of my children and grandchildren, I hope that the human talent for self-destruction can be successfully controlled, or at least channelled into productive forms, but I doubt it. I think we are moving into extremely volatile and dangerous times, as modern electronic technologies give mankind almost unlimited powers to play with its own psychopathology as a game.”

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Author:J. G. Ballard
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“Anger is generally seen as an unwelcome presence in our midst, however natural it may be. Although each person, and each society, is charged with how anger is to be appropriately channeled, the denial of anger, or its continuous repression, is a deep source of our psychopathology and will invariably seek its expression in a less healthful fashion.”

MayPersonsNaturalFashionExpressionSourceAngerDenialMidstRepressionPsychopathologyUnwelcome
Book:Why Good People Do Bad Things: Understanding Our Darker Selves
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“To one completely committed to this realm of becoming, as are the empiricists, the claim to apprehend verities is a sign of psychopathology. Probably we have here but a highly sophisticated expression of the doctrine that ideals are hallucination and that the only normal, sane person is the healthy extrovert, making instant, instinctive adjustments to the stimuli of the material world.”

WorldPersonsExpressionMaterialsBecomingHealthyNormalIdealsClaimsCommittedDoctrineRealmsInstantSaneSophisticatedStimulusAdjustmentHallucinationsMaterial WorldExtrovertsPsychopathology
Book:Ideas Have Consequences: Expanded Edition
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“It is tempting when looking at the life of anyone who has committed suicide to read into the decision to die a vastly complex web of reasons; and, of course, such complexity is warranted. No one illness or event causes suicide; and certainly no one knows all, or perhaps even most, of the motivations behind the killing of the self. But psychopathology is almost always there, and its deadliness is fierce. Love, success, and friendship are not always enough to counter the pain and destructiveness of severe mental illness”

KnowsSelfReasonEnoughPainMotivationDiesCoursesCausesDecisionBehindsEventsSuicideComplexesKillingIllnessCommittedMental IllnessComplexityFierceSevereTemptingPsychopathologyDestructiveness
Author:Kay Redfield Jamison
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“Let people realize clearly that every time they threaten someone or humiliate or unnecessarily hurt or dominate or reject another human being, they become forces for the creation of psychopathology, even if these be small forces. Let them recognize that every person who is kind, helpful, decent, psychologically democratic, affectionate, and warm, is a psychotheraputic force, even though a small one.”

PeopleIfsHumansKindPersonsForceRealizingHurtHuman BeingsCreationDemocraticWarmDecentHelpfulRejectsAffectionateHumiliatePsychopathology
Author:Abraham Maslow
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“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

PeopleDoeFactsFormMillionsVirtueShareErrorsVicesSanePathologyPsychopathologyErringPsychoanalytic
Book:The Erich Fromm Reader: Readings Selected and Edited by Rainer Funk
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“...Virtually never are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.”

PeopleWellsLawViolenceCrimeBehaviorOrdinaryGunAbuseExtremesAccidentsSubstanceExceptionIrrationalGun ControlMurdererLifelongAutomobileAbidingBansPsychopathologySubstance AbuseGun BanMental Retardation
Author:Don Kates
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“It's not psychopathology that counts. It's what you do with it.”

AttitudePositive ThinkingInspirational AttitudeCancerPositive AttitudeMy AttitudeThink PositivePositive Thinking And AttitudeBest AttitudeKeep A Positive AttitudePositive Thinking AttitudePsychopathologyGreat AttitudeAttitude And LifeGreat Positive AttitudePositive Thinking SuccessCancer PatientsHaving A Positive AttitudeShort Positive AttitudeAttitudes And SuccessThink Positive Be PositivePositive Attitude In LifeInspirational Positive AttitudePositive Attitude Towards LifePositive Attitude And SuccessPositive Thinking InspirationalCancer CourageInspirational CancerFighting CancerInspiring Cancer
Author:Anthony Storr
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