Psychiatry Quotes

Everybody believes in psychiatry it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

Psychotherapy, unlike castor oil, which will work no matter how you get it down, is useless when forced on an uncooperative patient.

I don't like psychiatry. I don't believe it works. I believe psychiatrists are neurotic or psychotic, for the most part.

Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis.

My dad is a doctor, a professor of psychiatry, and my mum is a psychotherapist.

I practiced medicine up 'til now. I practice psychiatry. I shifted from different specialties. I started as a village doctor - community doctor, public health preventive medicine.

There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that.

The plea for the predominance of learning to read in early school life because of the great importance attaching to literature seems to be a perversion.

Psychiatry does not commit human rights abuse. It is a human rights abuse.

I think that one of the things that has happened is that psychiatry has become the religion of liberalism.

After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.

Today the function of psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis threatens to become the tool in the manipulation of man.

I never read Freud. I've never been attracted to anything he has said, and I think he's started a lot of nonsense with psychiatry and that business. I don't think psychiatry can help or has helped anybody. I think it's a big fraud (pun not intended) on the public.

Psychiatric services - that is, the attempt to help a person overcome his emotional difficulties in living - are priceless if successful or worthless if they fail.

I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion

If you are well off and can afford to spend ten or twenty-five dollars a day to hire some patient soul to listen to your troubles you can be readjusted to the crazy scheme of things and spare yourself the humiliation of becoming a Christian Scientist. You can have your ego trimmed or removed, as you wish, just like a wart or bunion.

...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong". "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs. ...a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings.

Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.

Free sexual intercourse between young males and respectable girls" was urgently necessary or society was "doomed to fall a victim to incurable neuroses which reduce the enjoyment of life to a minimum, destroy the marriage relation and bring hereditary ruin on the whole coming generation.

The destructive impact of psychiatry upon our civilization has been given far too little attention, and the role of psychiatry in Nazi Germany almost no attention. It is entirely possible that without psychiatry the holocaust could never have taken place.

In psychoanalysis as in art, God resided in the details, the discovery of which required enormous patience, unyielding seriousness, and the skill of an acrobat - walking a tightrope over memory and speculation, instinct and theory, feeling and denial.

The religions of mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.

Going to a psychiatrist has become one of the most dangerous things a person can do.

You know what? I’m sure drug dealers on the street, in some way, they are making money. That’s what I equate it to. Here is the thing: you have to understand, with psychiatry, there is no science behind it. And to pretend that there is a science behind it is criminal

Psychiatry is the art of teaching people how to stand on their own feet while reclining on couches.

Psychoanalysis is an attempt to examine a person's self-justifications. Hence it can be undertaken only with the patient's cooperation and can succeed only when the patient has something to gain by abandoning or modifying his system of self-justification.

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

Institutional psychiatry is a continuation of the Inquisition. All that has really changed is the vocabulary and the social style. The vocabulary conforms to the intellectual expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-medical jargon that parodies the concepts of science. The social style conforms to the political expectations of our age: it is a pseudo-liberal social movement that parodies the ideals of freedom and rationality.

Are you seeing a psychiatrist?' as a conversation opener would nowadays earn you a punch in the nose, but for fifty years it was a compliment. It meant, 'One can plainly see you are sensitive, intense, and interesting, and therefore neurotic.' Only the dullest of clods trudged around without a neurosis.

It is nothing but a kind of a microcosmos of communism - all that psychiatry', rumbled Pnin ... 'Why not leave their private sorrow to people? Is sorrow not, one asks, the only thing in the world people really possess?

A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence.... If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity! If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity... Let us all, therefore, very secretly be 'fifth columnists.'

Psychiatrists are usually very well imbued with the clinical role, where helping the sick person is the goal. And that's quite incompatible with the truthseeking role. That's probably true of the other fields, too, but maybe more so of the personalities that gravitate toward psychiatry. They tend to care about people and wish to be helpful.

Conventional psychiatry has emphasized the genetic roots of psychosis based on the claim that twin and other studies show that schizophrenia is 80% heritable, which means that 80% of the cause is genetic.

Psychiatry in this place is like serving an in-flight meal in the middle of a plane crash. If I wanted to make you well, as a doctor, I should be giving you a parachute, not a cheese-and-pickle sandwich.

...the pretense is made, as it has been made in relation to the finding of any extension of truth, that to do away with right and wrong would produce uncivilized people, immorality, lawlessness and social chaos. The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respected people have escaped from moral chains and are able to think freely.

Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society." A "utopia" could be found - providing "a sense of stability and certainty, whether realistic or not.

But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.

I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.

My mom had the breakdown for the family, and I went into therapy for all of us.

It had become clear to me, in a flash of illumination, that for me the only possible goal was psychiatry. Here alone the two currents of my interest could flow together and in a united stream dig their own bed. Here was the empirical field common to biological and spiritual facts, which I had everywhere sought and nowhere found. Here at last was the place where the collision of nature and spirit became a reality.

Roses are red, violets are blue, I'm schizophrenic, and so am I.

I have discovered the value of psychology and psychiatry, that their teachings can undo knots in us and permit life to flow again and aid us in becoming more truly human.

Psychoanalysts seem to be long on information and short on application.

It's funny - people think analysis or psychiatry is mad, and THEY go to CHURCH.

LSD is a catalyst or amplifier of mental processes. If properly used it could become something like the microscope or telescope of psychiatry.

Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.

At bottom, antipsychiatry is still psychiatry. And it doesn't really address itself to women's problems.

the idea of a finished human product not only appears presumptuous but even, in my opinion, lacks any strong appeal. Life is struggle and striving, development and growth - and analysis is one of the means that can help in this process. Certainly its positive accomplishments are important, but also the striving itself is of intrinsic value.

All analyses end badly. Each 'termination' leaves the participants with the taste of ashes in their mouths; each is absurd; each is a small, pointless death. Psychoanalysis cannot tolerate happy endings; it casts them off the way the body's immunological system casts off transplanted organs.