#psychiatry

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. ↗

— Samuel R. Delany

#behaviour #philosophy #psychiatry #religion #thought

What do you think of Cain’s affirmations?” “He never told a lie. If he says that God talks to him, he is convinced that God is talking to him.” “Do you believe he is a saint?” “God only knows, and never better said. He might be, but again, I have my own taste on the matter. I’m not keen on perfection, especially when it’s dressed up like hardness. I prefer the cracked plate, the slightly blunt spear…” “The imperfect human being.” “Yes. The gloriously imperfect human being. ↗

— Olga Núñez Miret

#race #religion #religion

Is psychiatry a medical enterprise concerned with treating diseases, or a humanistic enterprise concerned with helping persons with their personal problems? Psychiatry could be one or the other, but it cannot--despite the pretensions and protestations of psichiatrists--be both. ↗

— Thomas Stephen Szasz

#medicine #morality #psychiatry #medicine

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. ↗

— Kate Millett

#believes #concede #everybody #good #i

Psychiatry causes so much death. ↗

— Kate Millett

#death #much #psychiatry

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you. ↗

— Kate Millett

#away #government #how #husband #kind

If you do jot feel equal to the headaches that psychiatry induces, you are in the wrong business. It is work - work the like of which I do not know. ↗

— Harry Stack Sullivan

#equal #feel #headaches #i #i do

They had taken me to an exhibit called 'Psychiatry: Industry of Death' on Hollywood Boulevard, where a Scientologist told me psychiatrists set up the Holocaust. I feared I was being brain-washed. And then I lost it - big time. ↗

— John Sweeney

#big #big time #boulevard #called #death

Neurology and psychiatry should be treating the same organ. ↗

— Alice Weaver Flaherty

#psychiatry #same #should #treating

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. ↗

— Edward Shorter

#history #psychiatry #age