Psychiatric Quotes

It may sound surprising when I say, on the basis of my own clinical practice as well as that of my psychological and psychiatric colleagues, that the chief problem of people in the middle decade of the twentieth century is emptiness. (Rollo May)
When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War. View quote
Robert Jay Lifton
Yes, I'm very normal, everything is okay, I won't become a psychiatric case. View quote
Alfred Jodl
The Greeks distinguished between good and bad behavior, language that enhanced or diminished persons. Being intoxicated with scientism, we fail to recognize that the seemingly technical terms used to identify psychiatric illnesses and interventions are simply dyphemisms and euphemisms. View quote
Thomas Szasz
I didn't get at first put into a rehab facility; I got put in a adolescent psychiatric unit for my detox. View quote
Jack Osbourne
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me. View quote
Darynda Jones
The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself. View quote
Kate Millett
We couldn't be making as much money, if we had to deal with stranger behaviour. And right now, anybody who slows down our economic productivity, off they go. We have a place for them, the psychiatric institution. That's the main thing, they slow things down. View quote
Chester Brown
I am a woman with chronic schizophrenia. I have spent hundreds of days in psychiatric hospitals. I could have ended up living most of my life on a back ward, but things turned out quite differently. View quote
Elyn Saks
Because my father was a psychiatric nurse, I know my way around the system. View quote
Trisha Goddard
In some quarters it has often been thought wise to substitute the term "developing" for "underdeveloped". One of the reasons for so doing is to avoid any unpleasantness which may be attached to the second term, which might be interpreted as meaning underdeveloped mentally, physically, morally, or in any other respect. Actually, if "underdevelopment” were related to anything other than comparing economies, then the most underdeveloped country in the world would be the U. S. A., which practices external oppression on a massive scale, while internally there is a blend of exploitation, brutality, and psychiatric disorder. (Walter Rodney)
In either event he could only adhere to the letter of the law, but then for every yea in the law there was a nay, and it always boiled down to simple expediency. Like a psychiatric diagnosis, it could always be juggled around to fit anything you chose. View quote
Mark Clifton
The names and connections, at this time, of the bitterly opposing enemy are: 1. Psychiatry and psychology (not medicine). 2. The heads of news media who are also directors of psychiatric front groups. 3. A few key political figures in the fields of "mental health" and education. 4. A decline of monetary stability caused by the current planning of bankers who are also directors of psychiatric front organizations [that] would make us unable to function. View quote
L. Ron Hubbard
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. View quote
Richard Weaver
If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures. View quote
Alfred Korzybski
I don't understand if you get caught in a fight, but take it out on a room, how that implies some psychiatric disorder. View quote
Sean Connery
Ex-cons always say, "You never know what makes the wheels go round until you've done time in the joint." This is even more true of psychiatric hospitals. It is a perfect mass hypostatization of society, the organization of the Social Lie. View quote
Kenneth Rexroth
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. View quote
Kenneth Rexroth
Depression has been called the world's 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. View quote
David D. Burns
The crime [homosexuality] was subject to punishment by both secular and ecclesiastical courts-just as now it is subject to punishment by both penal and psychiatric sanctions. View quote
Thomas Szasz
Judges and prosecutors, lawyers and psychiatrists, all protest their passionate desire to know why a person accused of a crime did what he did. But their actions completely belie their words: their efforts are now directed toward letting everyone speak in court but the defendant himself -- especially if he is accused of a political or psychiatric crime. (Thomas Szasz)
For millennia, the dialectic of vilification and deification and, more generally, of invalidation and validation-excluding the individual from the group as an evil outsider or including him in it as a member in good standing-was cast in the imagery and rhetoric of magic and religion. ... With the decline of the religious world view and the ascent of the scientific method during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the religious rhetoric of validation and invalidation was gradually replaced by the scientific. One of the most dramatic results of this transformation is the lexicon of psychiatric diagnoses functioning as a powerful, but largely unacknowledged, rhetoric of rejection and stigmatization. View quote
Thomas Szasz
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. View quote
Thomas Szasz
It is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. Psychiatrists are not concerned with mental illnesses and their treatments. In actual practice they deal with personal, social and ethical problems in living. I have argued that, today, the notion of a person "having a mental illness" is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to a popular rationalization - namely that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases. Moreover, the concept of mental illness also undermines the principle of personal responsibility, the ground on which all free political institutions rest. View quote
Thomas Szasz
Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine. View quote
Thomas Szasz