These psychiatric quotes will inspire you. Psychiatric, of or relating to the study of mental illness.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging psychiatric quotes, psychiatric sayings, and psychiatric proverbs.
Best Psychiatric Quotes
- “Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condense and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual’s body.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true. There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations. Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them.” ~ Peter Breggin
- “And I also felt that no one in an audience could abuse me worse than the sort of abuse I had had at work as a psychiatric nurse.” ~ Jo Brand
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“In reality, psychiatric diagnosing is a kind of spiritual profiling that can destroy lives and frequently does.” ~ Peter Breggin
- “Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.” ~ Kate Millett
- “We couldn’t be making as much money if we had to deal with stranger behavior. 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.” ~ Chester Brown
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“We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It’s a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.” ~ Elyn Saks
- “Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Welcome to the psychiatric hotline: if you are obsessive-compulsive press one repeatedly. If you are schizophrenic listen closely and a little voice will tell you which number to press. If you have borderline personality disorder hang up; you have already pushed everybody’s buttons.” ~ Barbara Oakley
- “What do you do when you don’t know what to do? No wonder there are more suicides among psychiatrists than in any other profession.” ~ R. D. Laing
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“…Jesus Christ might simply have returned to his carpentry following the use of modern psychiatric treatments.” ~ William Sargant
- “Homosexuality is a psychological and psychiatric disorder, there is no question about it. It is a purple menace that is threatening the proper design of gender distinctions in society.” ~ Charles W. Socarides
- “Anybody who enjoys being in the House of Commons probably needs psychiatric help.” ~ Ken Livingstone
- “If a psychiatric and scientific inquiry were to be made upon our rulers, mankind would be appalled at the disclosures.” ~ Alfred Korzybski
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“Labeling a child as mentally ill is stigmatization, not diagnosis. Giving a child a psychiatric drug is poisoning, not treatment.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “Even at this stage, my preparations were like strapping on a parachute in an airplane that was about to crash; the whole time I was preparing to hurl myself out the door, I clung to the hope that something would happen at the last minute to forestall that terrible necessity I felt-not hostility, as psychiatric texts would say, or vengeful rage, or a desire for attention. This was done in secret, out of a need to alleviate pain which was as implacable as thirst.” ~ Tracy Thompson
- “I’m great at a deathbed. I’ve never given tranquilizers or psychiatric medicine. I’ve given love and fun and creativity and passion and hope, and these things ease suffering.” ~ Patch Adams , Psychiatric quotes on love
- “The primitive thinking of the supernaturally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance. In Henry’s view, such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis.” ~ Ian Mcewan
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“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 backward, but things turned out quite differently.” ~ Elyn Saks
- “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
- “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 pharmacopeia at once, and he walks around in a psychotic trance beautifully painted all over with petrochemicals.” ~ Kenneth Rexroth
- “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.” ~ Czeslaw Milosz
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“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,.” ~ Abraham J. Twerski
- “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.” ~ Richard M. Weaver
- “I was in danger of having my children taken away from me when I needed five weeks in psychiatric care … There is the smiling depressive which is the biggest time bomb and when they go they usually go with a bang, which was me.” ~ Trisha Goddard
- “Depression has been called the worlds 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.” ~ David D. Burns
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“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.” ~ Kenneth Rexroth
- “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.” ~ Thomas Szasz
- “The Maze is a painting of the inside of my skull, which I painted when I was in England as a patient in Maudsley and Netherne psychiatric hospitals. It is a story of my life, well in the sense that people tell stories by the fireplace to entertain their guests, trying to make them accept you. In this case I wanted to be accepted, as an interesting specimen.” ~ William Kurelek
- “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.” ~ Eric Kandel
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“Psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests.” ~ Allen Frances
- “In my opinion, advocating, allowing and practicing psychiatric and psychoanalytic dogmas within the church is every bit as pagan and heretical (and therefore perilous) as propagating the teachings of some of the most bizarre cults. The only vital difference is that the cults are less dangerous because their errors are more identifiable.” ~ Jay E. Adams
- “The fact is, psychiatric help is not widely available to CIA agents – and as in the military, there is a stigma attached to admitting post-traumatic stress.” ~ Michael Hastings
- “If ever we needed in this country to adopt a new attitude towards homosexuality, this is the time. Instead of treating it as a crime, and driving it underground, we ought to recognize it for what it is: it’s a mental illness, it’s a psychiatric condition which ought to be treated sympathetically by psychiatrists and social workers.” ~ Tommy Douglas
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“Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.” ~ Francis Crick
- “Most of us don’t need a psychiatric therapist as much as a friend to be silly with.” ~ Robert Breault
- “Are psychiatric crises so overwhelming to the mind that they inhibit the presence of ethics? Is depression at root an amoral phenomenon, its focus on the self preventing any other from really counting? Perhaps. Sometimes. Sometimes, even when we are two we are really only one; we can feel nothing but our own bones, our own difficult breaths.” ~ Lauren Slater
- “Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.” ~ Emma Forrest
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“My goal in life is to have a psychiatric disorder named after me.” ~ Darynda Jones
- “Well. There is a psychiatric occurrence we see in men-not often women-where they put all their hopes and dreams onto one person, so intensely that at some point it trips a wire in the brain circuitry, and that causes them to go, in a minute, 180 degrees the other way.” ~ Emma Forrest
- “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?” ~ John Irving
- “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.” ~ Norman Reedus
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“I realized that I had screwed up my life living different parts of my life in different places. I wasn’t whole. I wasn’t integrated. I wasn’t a complete person. And after that, came out, spent some time at a psychiatric hospital.” ~ James McGreevey
- “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.” ~ Jonathan Michel Metzl
- “Countries with the best-resourced medical services have the best outcomes for physical illness (it is better to have a heart attack in Washington or London than in rural Africa) whereas precisely the opposite is the case for mental illness (developing nations with limited psychiatric resources have better outcomes and lower suicide rates).” ~ Richard Bentall
- “One year, I’d completely lost my bearings trying to follow potty training instruction from a psychiatric expert. I was stuck on step on, which stated without an atom of irony: “Before you begin, remove all stubbornness from the child.” . . . I knew it only could have been written by someone whose suit coat was still spotless at the end of the day, not someone who had any hands-on experience with an actual two-year-old.” ~ Mary Blakely
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“Some people still hold [the] view that restraints help psychiatric patients feel safe. I’ve never met a psychiatric patient who agreed.” ~ Elyn Saks
- “If hardship brought out the worst in people, the human race wouldn’t have survived. Right after 9/11, for instance, the murder rate actually went down in New York City. In World War II during the Blitz, the civilians of London were bombed almost every night for six months, but psychiatric admissions declined.” ~ Sebastian Junger
- “People with what we call mental illness can indeed serve well, and people who have no discernible mental illness – and that may be true of Trump – may not be able to serve, maybe quite unfit. So it isn’t always the question of a psychiatric diagnosis. It’s really a question of what psychological and other traits render one unfit or dangerous.” ~ Robert Jay Lifton
- “There are people who believe that there should be a standard psychiatric examination for every presidential candidate and for every president. But these are difficult issues because they can’t ever be entirely psychiatric. They’re inevitably political as well. I personally believe that ultimately ridding the country of a dangerous president or one who’s unfit is ultimately a political matter, but that psychological professionals can contribute in valuable ways to that decision.” ~ Robert Jay Lifton
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“Faint hearts are encouraged when they read about others who, despite amputation, spinal cord injury, or psychiatric disorders have a vibrant trust and confidence in God.” ~ Joni Eareckson Tada
- “I’d been a psychiatric social worker for 17 years, but within 24 hours after I started the case against studying reading Bible in school by my son, I was fired from my job as a supervisor in the city public welfare department. And I was unable to find another one. So my income was completely cut off.” ~ Madalyn Murray O’Hair
- “I have also been invited to talk to psychologists and psychoanalysts and I liked that very much. Because, they are the ones who are bringing a lot of very, you know, problematic ideas about sexuality and gender into psychiatric and psychological settings. And I like having some influence there.” ~ Judith Butler
- “Because I was in psychiatric treatment for most of my childhood and had to learn English and had to adjust to a white-dominated society, I truly know what being Sudanese refugees [adopting by white family] mean. It’s not something that you can explain in the confines of an interview, but there is an immediate comfort, a connection between black phenotypes that is natural.” ~ Kola Boof
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“I make the modest proposal that psychiatric care should be as easy to get as bullets at Wal-Mart.” ~ Andy Borowitz
- “As a conscientious objector I did my community service in 1971 in a psychiatric hospital and a friend there, who also was a guitar player, invited me one day to join him recording film music with a band named Kraftwerk which I didn’t know at the time. I came along and jammed at this session together with Ralf Hütter and a drummer (I believe his name was Charly Weiß). Florian Schneider and Klaus Dinger were present as listeners and everybody liked the spontaneous music we did together.” ~ Michael Rother
- “Following the school shootings, Hillary and Tipper Gore, as well as their husbands, got together for the first White House conference on mental health. Because of her interest in mental health and her own problem with anti-depressants, Tipper had been made the expert, the psychiatric consultant to the president, duly designated.” ~ Peter Breggin , Psychiatric quotes mental health
- “The statistic that 67 percent of women’s admissions to the psychiatric facilities are during the week before menstruation is critically important to every woman, and to every woman who feels she suffers from depression.” ~ Ayelet Waldman
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“[Our children] have been taken away from us by the psychiatric mental-health system. They’ve been taken away by the educational system, by the government, and by many different forces.” ~ Peter Breggin
- “I consider racism to be a medical problem. Racists need serious medical and psychiatric help, because they are killing themselves and making others suffer along with them.” ~ Ishmael Reed
- “From Hillary Clinton, in her own double-talking words, and from others, we understand that our children have been stolen from us by the state and by the psychiatric establishment.” ~ Michael Savage
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“Amateur psychiatric prognosis can be fascinating when there’s absolutely nothing else to do.” ~ Richard Condon
- “I have come to the conclusion that Tony Blair has finally gone mad … he made assertions that are so jaw-droppingly and breathtakingly at variance with reality that he surely needs professional psychiatric help.” ~ Boris Johnson
- “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.” ~ Jo Brand
