Psychiatry Quotes

“I remember a study that was done in the seventies (a study I've been trying to find unsuccessfully since the advent of the internet). It was a study of psychologists and psychiatrists, not of patients. They filled out three questionnaires, true or false questions. One was for the traits of a healthy man, next was for traits of a healthy woman, the third for traits of a healthy human being. The traits of a healthy man and human were the same, but a healthy woman was very different. Completely different. You know--softer, sweeter, more empathetic, less self-centered, less ambitious, more dependent. And these were the people who were treating people who were trying to live healthy lives.”
― Shellen Lubin

“The fear of psychiatry is one of the hardest ideas to shake when you escape from the mind-prison.”
― Mike Rinder, A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology

“The big insight was that giving a troubled person a psychiatric diagnosis and seeing that as the sole or main cause of their symptoms was unnecessarily limiting, pathologizing, and could become self-reinforcing.”
― Richard Schwartz, No Bad Parts: Healing Trauma and Restoring Wholeness with the Internal Family Systems Model

“So many people saying, Let's improve these problems right now! Except extremists. Extremists never wanted things to improve. They just wanted to win. They needed psychiatrists.”
― Naomi Shihab Nye, There Is No Long Distance Now

“If you are learning psychology to manipulate people, you don't need lessons, you need treatment.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Centurion Sermon: Mental Por El Mundo

“Believing in a non-existent unconscious simply reveals the not knowing about how the mind and our memory fundamentally works or who we really are.”
― Arne Klingenberg, Beyond Machine Man: Who we really are and why Transhumanism is just an empty promise!

“Serenity is born of simplicity,
Insecurity is born of clutter.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Rowdy Scientist: Handbook of Humanitarian Science

“Fear resisted is fear amplified, fear embraced is fear relieved.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Himalayan Sonneteer: 100 Sonnets of Unsubmission

“MYTHS ABOUT SUICIDE
1. Those who talk about suicide are not at risk of suicide.
2. All suicidal people are depressed or mentally ill.
3. Suicide occurs without warning.
4. Asking about suicide ‘plants’ the idea in someone’s head.
5. Suicidal people clearly want to die.
6. When someone becomes suicidal they will always remain suicidal.
7. Suicide is inherited.
8. Suicidal behaviour is motivated by attention-seeking.
9. Suicide is caused by a single factor.
10. Suicide cannot be prevented.
11. Only people of a particular social class die by suicide.
12. Improvement in emotional state means lessened suicide risk.
13. Thinking about suicide is rare.
14. People who attempt suicide by a low-lethality means are not serious about killing themselves.”
― Rory O’ Connor, When It Is Darkest: Why People Die by Suicide and What We Can Do to Prevent It

“...there's no psychiatrist in the world who can help a man unless he deals with his drug problem first.' (Dr. Berkman, San Quentin prison)”
― Danny Trejo, Trejo: My Life of Crime, Redemption, and Hollywood

“[E]motional suffering cannot be disowned from its sociocultural context. In other words, relationships are critical to virtually every psychiatric illness and its treatment. Those relationships stretch far beyond the therapist-patient relationship.”
― Dan G. Blazer, Freud vs. God

“Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torey proposed that psychotherapy is little more than a culturally specific healing ritual, similar to that of folk healers in primitive cultures.”
― Dan G. Blazer, Freud vs. God

“Psychiatrists should take the lead in expressing caution about solving emotional angst by taking a pill. Doctors of the soul will distinguish between the proper use of medication for treating psychiatric disorders and the inappropriate desire to cure social and existential pain with a pill.”
― Dan G. Blazer, Freud vs. God

“[N]eurobiology will never be the bridge to the unconscious, for neurobiology explains at a different level from psychology.
[...]
One approach that retains the knowledge of biological mechanisms yet does not assume a reductionistic approach is supervenience. Properties of one kind, such as consciousness, supervene on properties of another kind, such as neurochemical transmission [.] The underlying property must be there, but the supervening property cannot be reduced to the underlying property. Therefore different avenues of inquiry into the thoughts and behaviors of mankind are necessary if we are to avoid the deterministic, and frankly, depressing limits of a purely materialistic approach.”
― Dan G. Blazer, Freud vs. God

“Descriptive psychiatry can't determine whether or not a person's story [...] is a true one. More important, it can't tell us whether the list of symptoms, no matter how reliable, constitutes a disease. It can gather scattered particles into a category [...], but it can't say whether those amount to the natural formation known as disease.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“The Freudian paradigm is so intertwined with liberalism and humanism and America that to doubt the former is to implicitly denigrate the latter.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture

“[P]eople who have invested hundreds of thousands of hours and thousands of dollars in therapies arising from Freudian theory are not pleased to learn that the theory is devoid of any scientific foundation.”
― E. Fuller Torrey, Freudian Fraud: The Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture

“America is the paradise for psychiatrists.”
― Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer

“I had moments of lucidity. They were few, but I had them. Sometimes the drugs did work. But there were people who didn't get better, even with the medicine. What good is hospitalisation, then? To gather together the human debris.”
― Rodrigo de Souza Leão, All Dogs Are Blue

“I suffer, therefore I am.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Aşk Mafia: Armor of The World

“But we all know that the DSM is at its best a clumsy and imperfect field guide to our foibles and at its worst a compendium of expert opinions masquerading as scientific truths, a book whose credibility surpasses its integrity, whose usefulness is primarily commercial, and whose most ardent defenders are reduced to arguing that it should be taken less seriously even as all of us - clinicians, researchers, and copyright holders alike - cash in on the fact that it is not.”
― Gary Greenberg, The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry

“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.”
― Randolph M. Nesse, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine

“. . . military psychologists tell me that the best practitioners in their field are those trained in child psychiatry; eighteen- and nineteen-year-old men are, in the clinician's view, still children.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“. . . psychological distress is often associated with rashes, hives, psoriasis, acne, impotence, coughing, as well as diarrhea, constipation, stomach pain, and low and high blood pressure. Gastrointestinal symptoms are so common in mental illnesses that some doctors call the intestines a 'second brain.' Stress can also lead to non-epileptic seizures, tremor, visual impairment, back pain, and gait abnormalities. In fact, the majority of people in the United States and the UK with common mental illnesses, such as anxiety disorder and depression, do not present with psychological complaints. They go to their primary care physicians who attempt to treat bodily symptoms and likely never find out if the patient is anxious or depressed unless the patient describes his problems as at least partially psychological.

All symptoms, including psychological ones, have a biological component, even if they originate from environmental stressors; and, conversely, many biological phenomena have a psychological component. We need only think about something as simple as blushing, which most people will agree is caused by an uncomfortable social interaction, or sometimes just the fantasy about such an interaction. Embarrassment triggers a reaction in which chemicals and hormones come into play to dilate our veins, bring blood to the surface of the skin, and cool the body. Our heart rate increases too. Moreover, scientists have repeatedly demonstrated that psychiatric conditions, and stressors in general, are a significant risk factor for a variety of different medical illnesses.”
― Roy Richard Grinker, Nobody's Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness

“Psychiatry is a hoax.

…political construct of gaslighting to let people continue thinking a certain way.

…it is fantasy because it could have easily been elsehow.

Professionals… suspects of crimes of false realities.”
― Maria Karvouni, Reality Is Just A Possible Fantasy

“You are never too broken to be fixed,
You are never too fixed to be broken.
Life is a dance between hurt and heal,
sometimes psycho, sometimes surreal,
To wake up to life you gotta be shaken.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sapionova: 200 Limericks for Students

“You are never too broken to be fixed,
You are never too fixed to be broken.
Life is a dance between hurt and heal,
Sometimes psycho, sometimes surreal.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sapionova: 200 Limericks for Students

“There isn’t a clear boundary between the everyday and the pathological.”
― Lucy Foulkes, Losing Our Minds: The Challenge of Defining Mental Illness

“All the world's an asylum,
All the people are lunatics.
Some are but loonies of love,
Some loonies run by prejudice.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect

“All the world's an asylum,
All the people are lunatics.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Insan Himalayanoğlu: It's Time to Defect