#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

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

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

— Marlene Steinberg

#dissociative #dissociative-identity-disorder #dsm #mental-health #multiple-personality-disorder

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

— Alfred Hitchcock

#contributing #done #information #much #need

Physical nature lies at our feet shackled with a hundred chains. What of the control of human nature? Do not point to the triumphs of psychiatry, social services or the war against crime. Domination of human nature can only mean the domination of every man by himself. ↗

— Johan Huizinga

#chains #control #crime #domination #every

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. ↗

— Robert Jay Lifton

#calendar #club #cornell #covering #did

The other thing that happened was my last military assignment - this was in the air force; I had enlisted in order to avoid being drafted as a private, and of course I only practiced medicine or psychiatry in the air force so I was never in any kind of violent combat. ↗

— Robert Jay Lifton

#air force #any #assignment #avoid #being

I decided early in graduate school that I needed to do something about my moods. It quickly came down to a choice between seeing a psychiatrist or buying a horse. Since almost everyone I knew was seeing a psychiatrist, and since I had an absolute belief that I should be able to handle my own problems, I naturally bought a horse. ↗

— Kay Redfield Jamison

#mood-swings #psychiatry #funny

The American temptation is to believe that foreign policy is a subdivision of psychiatry. ↗

— Henry A. Kissinger

#believe #foreign #foreign policy #policy #psychiatry