Best 199 quotes in «psychiatry quotes» category

A vast amount of psychiatric effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to legal and quasi-legal activities. In my opinion, the only certain result has been the aggrandizement of psychiatry. The value to the legal profession and to society as a whole of psychiatric help in administering the criminal law, is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps society has been injured, rather than helped, by the furor psychodiagnosticus and psychotherapeuticus in criminology which it invited, fostered, and tolerated.

A wide variety of dissociative disorders including DID occur in the psychiatric population and may be misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed for a variety of reasons. Some psychiatrists believe these disorders are extremely rare and some believe that they do not exist. More research is needed, but these disorders may be more common than previously thought.

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They're all in rather uneasy truce with one another in what's actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man's ideals, so therefore a religious experience just becomes a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn't want to get all wound up in any systems at all.

But does psychological sophistication override a sense that some actions are just plain bad? How much of human behaviour, in the end, can one understand?

Can you smell his sweat? That peculiar goatish odor is trans-3-methyl-2 hexenoic acid. Remember it, it's the smell of schizophrenia.

Delusions Dissociative disorders, even those created by mind controllers, are not psychosis, but this program will create the most common symptom used to diagnose schizophrenia. The child is hurt while on a turntable, with people and television sets and cartoons and photographs all around the turntable. New alters created by the torture are instructed that they must obey their instructions and become the people around them, people on television, or other alters when they are told to. When this program is triggered, the survivor will hear “voices” of the people whom the "copy alters” are imitating, or will have many confused alters popping out who think they are actually other people or movie stars. The identities of the copy alters change when the survivor's surrounding change.

DENIAL Defense mechanism in which the existence of unpleasant realities is disavowed; refers to keeping out of conscious awareness any aspects of external reality that, if acknowledged, would produce anxiety.

Consciousness returns to its own dark thoughts and bad memories as reliably as kids to their own scabs, and maybe it's not so difficult to understand why. The mind doesn't like unresolved issues. Except that moods don't get resolved, they get forgotten – but just try forgetting the free-fall through depression's vacuum in a hurry. Worse than that, depression isn't just a memory, it's a state of mind. If you remember it, you're in it.

Denial and minimizing is often seen in genuine PTSD and, hence, should be a target of detection and measurement.

Despite the growing clinical and research interest in dissociative symptoms and disorders, it is also true that the substantial prevalence rates for dissociative disorders are still disproportional to the number of studies addressing these conditions. For example, schizophrenia has a reported rate of 0.55% to 1% of the normal population (Goldner, Hus, Waraich, & Somers, more or less similar to the prevalence of DID. Yet a PubMed search generated 25,421 papers on research related to schizophrenia, whereas only 73 publications were found for DID-related research.

Despite what you might think, NORMAL people do NOT cause problems, misfortunes, conflicts, distress or accidents. And when they do, they CAN apologize and recognize their negative influence. A person that causes these things and can’t assume any responsibility for them is, apart from showing the cognitive and moral level of a child, deserving nothing more than abandonment, because she is dangerous at all levels and can hurt, or even kill, someone BY ACCIDENT, including herself and whoever is with her. A person like this DOES NOT deserve any TRUST for ANYTHING, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING.

DID survivors are failed twice: once at the initial point of their abuse/trauma and again when the system fails to acknowledge their needs, even doubting their diagnosis if they have been fortunate enough to obtain one. This cannot be right in the twenty-first century.

Dissociation is the ultimate form of human response to chronic developmental stress, because patients with dissociative disorders report the highest frequency of childhood abuse and/or neglect among all psychiatric disorders. The cardinal feature of dissociation is a disruption in one or more mental functions. Dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, derealization, identity confusion, and identity alterations are core phenomena of dissociative psychopathology which constitute a single dimension characterized by a spectrum of severity. Clinical Psychopharmacology and Neuroscience 2014 Dec; 12(3): 171-179 The Many Faces of Dissociation: Opportunities for Innovative Research in Psychiatry

Dissociation is characterized by a disruption of usually integrated functions of memory, consciousness, identity, or perception of the environment.

Dissociative disorders (DDs) were first recognized as official psychiatric disorders in 1980 with the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Third Edition (DSM III) in 1980. Prior to this, the related symptoms were listed under ‘hysterical neuroses’ in the second edition of the DSM.[1,2] Interestingly, all of the current DDs that have been described were discovered prior to 1900 but decades passed with little study or research of this spectrum of psychiatric pathology.

DSM-5 is not 'the bible of psychiatry' but a practical manual for everyday work. Psychiatric diagnosis is primarily a way of communicating. That function is essential but pragmatic—categories of illness can be useful without necessarily being 'true.' The DSM system is a rough-and-ready classification that brings some degree of order to chaos. It describes categories of disorder that are poorly understood and that will be replaced with time. Moreover, current diagnoses are syndromes that mask the presence of true diseases. They are symptomatic variants of broader processes or arbitrary cut-off points on a continuum.

He tried to sleep, but his head was filled with the faces of lunatics, their palsied hands, their shattered eyes.

Facing up to non-being enables us to put our life into perspective, see it in its entirety, and thereby lend it a sense of direction and unity. If the ultimate source of anxiety is fear of the future, the future ends in death; and if the ultimate source of anxiety is uncertainty, death is the only certainty. It is only by facing up to death, accepting its inevitability, and integrating it into life that we can escape from the pettiness and paralysis of anxiety, and, in so doing, free ourselves to make the most out of our lives and out of ourselves.

For the analyst it is a source of never-ending astonishment how comparatively well a person can function with the core of himself not participating.

Every part of the brain plays a crucial role in the construction of something magnificent which we call ”mind”. But if we observe closely, the mind doesn’t exactly exist as one distinct process or entity or system. It’s rather an illusion. We can understand this better if we see the mind as a nation. Think of the nation you live in. Is there really any such thing as a ”nation”! A nation is simply the collection of activities of a group of people inside an imaginary border. Likewise, mind is the collection of activities of a group of neurons inside the skull. And just like in a nation, when a few neurons malfunction, others can slowly learn to take their place. But when an entire group of neurons in a specific brain region malfunctions, it can impede in the proper functioning of the mind, just like when a huge number of people in an entire state or district stop working, it can affect the functioning of the entire nation.

Frosh (2002) has suggested that therapeutic spaces provide children and adults with the rare opportunity to articulate experiences that are otherwise excluded from the dominant symbolic order. However, since the 1990s, post-modern and post-structural theory has often been deployed in ways that attempt to ‘manage’ from; afar the perturbing disclosures of abuse and trauma that arise in therapeutic spaces (Frosh 2002). Nowhere is this clearer than in relation to organised abuse, where the testimony of girls and women has been deconstructed as symptoms of cultural hysteria (Showalter 1997) and the colonisation of women’s minds by therapeutic discourse (Hacking 1995). However, behind words and discourse, ‘a real world and real lives do exist, howsoever we interpret, construct and recycle accounts of these by a variety of symbolic means’ (Stanley 1993: 214). Summit (1994: 5) once described organised abuse as a ‘subject of smoke and mirrors’, observing the ways in which it has persistently defied conceptualisation or explanation. Explanations for serious or sadistic child sex offending have typically rested on psychiatric concepts of ‘paedophilia’ or particular psychological categories that have limited utility for the study of the cultures of sexual abuse that emerge in the families or institutions in which organised abuse takes pace. For those clinicians and researchers who take organised abuse seriously, their reliance upon individualistic rather than sociological explanations for child sexual abuse has left them unable to explain the emergence of coordinated, and often sadistic, multi—perpetrator sexual abuse in a range of contexts around the world.

Grief is NOT a mental illness or an emotional disorder. Anyone who tells you otherwise has never experienced it for themselves.

Hva ville det egentlig si å være sinnssyk? Man kunne jo glatt vekk kalle hinannens særegenheter og mer eller mindre brysomme eiendommeligheter for sinnssykdom. Hvem kun hindre det? Én hadde aversjon for katter, en annen var ikke til å bevege til å foreta seg noe på en mandag, en tredje gikk ikke i seng uten først å sette skoene baklengs foran sovekammerdøren, en fjerde trodde på drømmer og lot seg påvirke av dem, en femte hadde talt med hedenfarne ånder og visste at han efter døden skulle komme i den niende himmel, en sjette hadde hatt en åpenbaring av apostelen Petrus, og av ham fått malt til å helbrede sykdommer ved håndspåleggelse, en syvende ble søvnløs av gremmelse over ikke å kunne få sitt arbeide til, en åttende følte seg så uskikket for jordelivet at han foretrakk godvillig å absentere seg, en niende hadde dårlig mave, og var som følge av det umulig å omgåes, en tiende drakk og foretok seg i fullskap de merkeligste og avskyeligste ting, en ellevte hadde motbydelighet for det annet kjønn, en tolvte kunne ikke tåle synet av barn, en trettende fikk stivkrampe når han kom i nærheten av rotter og mus, en fjortende var stormannsgal og bilte seg inn at han visste til punkt og prikke hva som skulle kalles sinnssykdom og hva ikke, og så fremdeles i det uendelige.

I detected a relish in their application of little details, the brushstrokes being added to their work of art as it progressed from a simple line drawing to an ornately decorated and multi-layered, palimpsest painting.

I began to see that the stronger a therapy emphasized feelings, self-esteem, and self-confidence, the more dependent the therapist was upon his providing for the patient ongoing, unconditional, positive regard. The more self-esteem was the end, the more the means, in the form of the patient’s efforts, had to appear blameless in the face of failure. In this paradigm, accuracy and comparison must continually be sacrificed to acceptance and compassion; which often results in the escalation of bizarre behavior and bizarre diagnoses. The bizarre behavior results from us taking credit for everything that is positive and assigning blame elsewhere for anything negative. Because of this skewed positive-feedback loop between our judged actions and our beliefs, we systematically become more and more adapted to ourselves, our feelings, and our inaccurate solitary thinking; and less and less adapted to the environment that we share with our fellows. The resultant behavior, such as crying, depression, displays of temper, high-risk behavior, or romantic ventures, or abandonment of personal responsibilities, which seem either compulsory, necessary, or intelligent to us, will begin to appear more and more irrational to others. The bizarre diagnoses occur because, in some cases, if a ‘cause disease’ (excuse from blame) does not exist, it has to be 'discovered’ (invented). Psychiatry has expanded its diagnoses of mental disease every year to include 'illnesses’ like kleptomania and frotteurism [now frotteuristic disorder in the DSM-V]. (Do you know what frotteurism is? It is a mental disorder that causes people, usually men, to surreptitiously fondle women’s breasts or genitals in crowded situations such as elevators and subways.) The problem with the escalation of these kinds of diagnoses is that either we can become so adapted to our thinking and feelings instead of our environment that we will become dissociated from the whole idea that we have a problem at all; or at least, the more we become blameless, the more we become helpless in the face of our problems, thinking our problems need to be 'fixed’ by outside help before we can move forward on our own. For 2,000 years of Western culture our problems existed in the human power struggle constantly being waged between our principles and our primal impulses. In the last fifty years we have unprincipled ourselves and become what I call 'psychologized.’ Now the power struggle is between the 'expert’ and the 'disorder.’ Since the rise of psychiatry and psychology as the moral compass, we don’t talk about moral imperatives anymore, we talk about coping mechanisms. We are not living our lives by principles so much as we are living our lives by mental health diagnoses. This is not working because it very subtly undermines our solid sense of self.

I cannot accept the proposition that the four-hundred-year travail of the American Negro should result merely in his attainment of the present level of American civilisation. I am far from convinced that being released from the African witch doctor was worthwhile if I am now - in order to support the moral contradictions and the spiritual aridity of my life - expected to become dependent on the American psychiatrist. It is a bargain I refuse.

I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there.

Identity confusion is defined by the SCID-D as a subjective feeling of uncertainty, puzzlement, or conflict about one's own identity. Patients who report histories of childhood trauma characteristically describe themes of ongoing inner struggle regarding their identity; of inner battles for survival; or other images of anger, conflict, and violence. P13

I don’t like psychiatrists,” Alecto told her. “Not because they don’t think I’m real, but because they have no idea what they’re doing.

I believe ADHD is a constellation of symptoms that our society interprets as a medical condition [...]. ADHD certainly "exists," in the sense that many children exhibit behaviors that parents and teachers can see and doctors can measure. But in my view ADHD is neither an unnatural condition of childhood nor an illness that requires medication. Often, behaviors tagged as ADHD are normal childhood responses to stressful situations. I believe ADHD is overdiagnosed and overmedicated and that well-meaning parents from all backgrounds have been duped into believing that their perfectly normal and healthy child needs powerful psychostimulant medications just to be "normal" and successful. I believe this is harmful to parents and to children, and I believe there is a better way.

If the mind fits, shrink it.

I finally saw the whole conspiracy standing as plain as an elephant in the street; also the conspiracy was admitted to me in great detail by one of the princes of the conspiracy." "Bad, Smith, very bad." "If one of the inmates should come to you right now, Doctor, and tell you it was raining outside, you'd say 'Bad, very bad', and make damning marks on his record." " That's probably true. It's an automatic response with me.

If there is one central intellectual reality at the end of the twentieth century, it is that the biological approach to psychiatry--treating mental illness as a genetically influenced disorder of brain chemistry--has been a smashing success. Freud's ideas, which dominated the history of psychiatry for the past half century, are now vanishing like the last snows of winter.

If you are paying someone to motivate you (seriously), you should rather pay to a psychiatrist.

If two people with no symptoms in common can both receive the same diagnosis of schizophrenia, then what is the value of that label in describing their symptoms, deciding their treatment, or predicting their outcome, and would it not be more useful simply to describe their problems as they actually are? And if schizophrenia does not exist in nature, then how can researchers possibly find its cause or correlates? If psychiatric research has made so little progress in recent decades, it is in large part because everyone has been barking up the wrong tree. It is not a question of getting a bigger and better scanner, but of going right back to the drawing board. What’s more, medical-type labels can be as harmful as they are hollow. By reducing rich, varied, and complex human experiences to nothing more than a mental disorder, they not only sideline and trivialize those experiences but also imply an underlying defect that then serves as a pseudo-explanation for the person’s disturbed behaviour. This demeans and disempowers the person, who is deterred from identifying and addressing the important life problems that underlie his distress.

Instead of seeing ADHD-type behaviors as part of the spectrum of normal childhood that most kids eventually grow out of, or as responses to bumps or rough patches in a child's life, we cluster these behaviors into a discrete (and chronic) "illness" or "mental health condition" with clearly defined boundaries. And we are led to believe that this "illness" is rooted in the child's genetic makeup and requires treatment with psychiatric medication.

If you doubt your sanity, is that proof?

Les psychiatres, c'est très efficace. Moi, avant, je pissais au lit, j'avais honte. Je suis allé voir un psychiatre, je suis guéri. Maintenant, je pisse au lit, mais j'en suis fier. Psychiatrists are very efficient. Before, I used to wet the bed. I went to see a psychiatrist, and was cured. Now, when I wet the bed, I'm proud of it.

Implicit [in the psychiatric literature] is a set of normative assumptions regarding the father's prerogatives and the mother's obligations within the family, The father, like the children, is presumed to be entitled to the mother's love, nurturance, and care. In fact, his dependent needs actually supersede those of the children, for if a mother falls to provide the accustomed intentions, it is taken for granted that some other female must be found to take her place. The oldest daughter is a frequent choice... The father's wish, indeed his right, to continue to receive female nurturance, whatever the circumstances, is accepted without question.

I myself must also say I believe it is true that in the end humanitarianism will triumph; only I fear that at the same time the world will be one big hospital and each person will be the other person's humane keeper.

In America, the role of blacks, as for humans everywhere, is to live and flourish and to be fit progenitors for generations to come. To do so, they must oppose racism in an unrelenting way. Psychiatry for such warriors aims to keep them fit for the duty at hand and healthy enough to enjoy the victories that are certain to come.

In the land of the crazies, we are all sane.

Imagine a psychiatrist sitting down with a broken human being saying, I am here for you, I am committed to your care, I want to make you feel better, I want to return your joy to you, I don't know how I will do it but I will find out and then I will apply one hundred percent of my abilities, my training, my compassion and my curiosity to your health -- to your well-being, to your joy. I am here for you and I will work very hard to help you. I promise. If I fail it will me my failure, not yours. I am the professional. I am the expert. You are experiencing great pain right now and it is my job and my mission to cure you from your pain. I am absolutely committed to your care... I know you are suffering. I know you are afraid, I love you. I want to cure you and I won't stop trying to help you. You are my patient. I am your doctor. You are my patient. Imagine a doctor phoning you at all hours of the day and night to tell you that he or she had been reading some new stuff on the subject of whatever and was really excited about how it might help you. Imagine a doctor calling you in an important meeting and saying listen, I'm so sorry to bother you but I"ve been thinking really hard about your problems and I'd like to try something completely new. I need to see you immediately! I"m absolutely committed to your care! I think this might help you. I won't give up on you.

In 1949, neurologist Egas Moniz (1874-1955) received a Nobel Prize for his discovery of ‘the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses’. Today, prefrontal leucotomy is derided as a barbaric treatment from a much darker age, and it is to be hoped that, one day, so too might antipsychotic drugs.

In psychiatry, Doctor -unlike, perhaps, the world of sexually transmitted disease clinics- there is no such thing as a cure. There is only adjustment.

Invisibility can be good as a superpower. But psychiatry reveals people don't like it very much.

Instead of being experienced consciously (either diffusely or displaced, as in phobias) the impulse causing the anxiety is "converted" into functional symptoms in organs or parts of the body, usually those that are mainly under voluntary control. The symptoms serve to lessen conscious (felt) anxiety and ordinarily are symbolic of the underlying mental conflict. Such reactions usually meet immediate needs of the patient and are, therefore, associated with more or less obvious "secondary gain." They are to be differentiated from psychophysiologic autonomic and visceral disorders. The term "conversion reaction" is synonymous with "conversion hysteria." Dissociative reactions are not included in this diagnosis. In recording such reactions the symptomatic manifestations will be specified as anesthesia (anosmia, blindness, deafness), paralysis (paresis, aphonia, monoplegia, or hemiplegia), dyskinesis (tic, tremor, posturing, catalepsy).

I recently consulted to a therapist who felt he had accomplished something by getting his dissociative client to remain in her ANP throughout her sessions with him. His view reflects the fundamental mistake that untrained therapists tend to make with DID and DDNOS. Although his client was properly diagnosed, he assumed that the ANP should be encouraged to take charge of the other parts at all times. He also expected her to speak for them—in other words, to do their therapy. This denied the other parts the opportunity to reveal their secrets, heal their pain, or correct their childhood-based beliefs about the world. If you were doing family therapy, would it be a good idea to only meet with the father, especially if he had not talked with his children or his spouse in years? Would the other family members feel as if their experiences and feelings mattered? Would they be able to improve their relationships? You must work with the parts who are inside of the system. Directly.

It is clear that we cannot distinguish the sane from the insane in psychiatric hospitals. The hospital itself imposes a special environment in which the meanings of behavior can easily be misunderstood. The consequences to patients hospitalized in such an environment-the powerlessness, depersonalization, segregation, mortification, and self-labeling-seem undoubtedly countertherapeutic.

My other client, whom I will call Teresa, thought Lorraine had MPD and hoped I could help her. Almost no one recognized this condition in those days. Lorraine was forty years old and had been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was thirteen. She had had various diagnoses, mainly severe depression, and she had made quite a few serious suicide attempts before I even met her. She had been given many courses of electric shock therapy, which would confuse her so much that she could not get together a coherent suicide plan for quite a while. Lorraine’s psychiatrist was initially opposed to my seeing her, as her friend Teresa had been stigmatized with the "borderline personality disorder" diagnosis when in hospital, so was seen as a bad influence on her. But after Lorraine spent a couple of months in hospital calling herself Susie and acting consistently like a child, he was humble enough to acknowledge that perhaps he could learn some new things, and someone else’s help might be a good idea.