There was a time when only wise books were read helping us to bear our pain and misery. This, after all, is not quite the same as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics. And yet the world is different from what it seems to be and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
The problem for many people is that we cannot point to the underlying biological bases of most psychiatric disorders. In fact, we are nowhere near understanding them as well as we understand disorders of the liver or the heart.
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.
Yes, I'm very normal, everything is okay, I won't become a psychiatric case.
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.
Psychoanalysis has changed American psychology from a diagnostic to a therapeutic science, not because so many patients are cured by the psychoanalytic technique, but because of the new understanding of psychiatric patients it has given us, and the new and different concept of illness and health.
Men have cried out to me in sincere and despairing appeal: 'Doctor, I cannot go on like this! I have everything to live for! I must stop, but I cannot! You must help me!'. . . One feels that something more than human power is needed to produce the essential psychic change. Though the aggregate of recoveries resulting from psychiatric effort is considerable, we physicians must admit we have made little impression upon the problem as a whole. Many types do not respond to the ordinary psychological approach.
Most of us don't need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with.
When anxiety disrupts functioning, it's psychiatric illness.
It seems to me that people who don’t learn as easily as others suffer from a kind of learning disability—there is something different about the way they comprehend unfamiliar material—but I fail to see how this disability is improved by psychiatric consultation. What seems to be lacking is a technical ability that those of us called ‘good students’ are born with. Someone should concretely study these skills and teach them. What does a shrink have to do with the process?
I too searched far and wide for the cure to addiction, but my medical and psychiatric background did not lead me to the cure because the source of addiction does not lie here,.
Having done a normal job for 10 years, as a psychiatric nurse dealing with emergencies, I know what terrible, hopeless lives some people have. So in many ways, it's great to be able to wield the financial power that I can, and do gigs, fundraisers or give money. I feel lucky I can help out.
Judging people for whom they love (a same sex partner) rather than by whom they harm, should in itself merit a psychiatric diagnosis.
The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.
My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.
Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I've never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.
Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent. . . and remarkably popular products and practices.
I've shot films in locations that have seemed haunted. I shot a film in a maximum-security prison in Russia. Part of it was on a psychiatric ward - there were definitely some creepy vibes there.
Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there's absolutely nothing else to do.
