Best 3 quotes of Ron Powers on MyQuotes

...I have sometimes imagined my own sanity as resting on the surface of a membrane, a thin and fragile membrane that can easily be ripped open, plunging me into the abyss of madness, where I join the tumbling souls whose membranes have likewise been pieced over the ages. Sometimes, when my thoughts are especially fevered, I can visualize the agent of this piercing. It is a watchful presence at the edge of things, silent and dripping, a stranger in a raincoat... When we fall into such psychosis, there are no other membranes below to catch and protect us. And the horror and helplessness of the fall are intensified by an uncaring world.

The future will be decided in a thousand American urban neighborhoods and suburban conference centers and small-town church basements and library meeting rooms and rural kitchens... The future of mental health reform will depend upon whether enough people gather in enough of such venues as these to contemplate work of Dorothea Dix by joining to reject and extinguish our modern Bedlams, and replace these Bedlams with a reborn and more sophisticated and more enduring program of moral care. It will depend upon whether enough people will take notice of and be inspired by the rediscovery made by sociologists and psychiatrists: that kindness, companionship, and intimate care are demonstrable counterforces to deepening psychosis. Not cures, but counterforces, particularly when practiced in concert with psychotropic regimens that fit the specific nature of a person's affliction as well as that person's specific biosystem.

The mentally ill people in our lives, as they strive to build healthy, well-supported, and rewarding lives for themselves, can show us all how to reconnect with the most primal of human urges, the urge to be of use, disentangling from social striving, consumer obsession, cynicism, boredom, and isolation, and honoring it among the true sources of human happiness.