#psychiatry

There is no fun in psychiatry. If you try to get fun out of it, you pay a considerable price for your unjustifiable optimism. ↗

— Harry Stack Sullivan

#fun #get #optimism #out #pay

Psychiatry enables us to correct our faults by confessing our parents' shortcomings. ↗

— Laurence J. Peter

#correct #enables #faults #our #parents

A little later, when breakfast was over and I had not yet gone up-stairs to my room, I had my first interview with Doctor Brandon, the famous alienist who was in charge of the case. I had never seen him before, but from the first moment that I looked at him I took his measure, almost by intuition. He was, I suppose, honest enough -- I have always granted him that, bitterly as I have felt toward him. It wasn't his fault that he lacked red blood in his brain, or that he had formed the habit, from long association with abnormal phenomena, of regarding all life as a disease. He was the sort of physician -- every nurse will understand what I mean -- who deals instinctively with groups instead of with individuals. He was long and solemn and very round in the face; and I hadn't talked to him ten minutes before I knew he had been educated in Germany, and that he had learned over there to treat every emotion as a pathological manifestation. I used to wonder what he got out of life -- what any one got out of life who had analyzed away everything except the bare structure. ↗

— Ellen Glasgow

#analysis #pathology #psychiatrist #psychiatry #psychologist

And what science had revealed was this: Prior to treatment, patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, depression, and other psychiatric disorders do not suffer from any known "chemical imbalance". However, once a person is put on a psychiatric medication, which, in one manner or another, throws a wrench into the usual mechanics of a neuronal pathway, his or her brain begins to function, as Hyman observed, abnormally. ↗

— Robert Whitaker

#science

You have to figure that there is something seriously wrong with somebody who wants to enter a profession that deals with whether people are screwing enough. Dealing with spirits, spooks, and demons almost seemed normal. ↗

— Tom Upton

#humor #psychiatry #young-adult #humor

A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money. ↗

— Sylvia Plath

#psychiatry #psychology #spirituality #age

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence. ↗

— Mordecai Richler

#literature #psychiatry #grammar

Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#heterosexuality #libido #nature #norms #psychiatry

Perfection is something we should all strive for. It's a duty and a joy to perfect one's nature... The most difficult thing is love. A loveless, driving person that just competes in the rat race is far from perfection in my book. ↗

— R.D. Laing

#philosophy #psychiatry #inspirational

My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection. ↗

— Sigmund Freud

#inspirational #inspirational-quotes #love #lovers #psychiatry