M. Scott Peck Quotes

Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.

I think that there are cancers of the body, but I think they are what I would call cancer of the emotional system, too. These are the kind of diseases or illnesses or sicknesses of the emotional system that are as incurable as cancer.

To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It happened to us; we are its victim, and we have no control over it.

Every age develops its own peculiar forms of pathology, which express in exaggerated form its underlying character structure.

I think women go crazy for a reason. It's not like it just happens.

I think the science around mental illness is always evolving. There's always new kinds of thinking.

I think there's a lot of mental instability in this whole country.

I will tell you, I feel very, very bad for Kanye West. He's not well, and that is the very foundation of everything he says.

Any other illness, any other disease that we're faced with, there's sympathy and understanding. We get help for those. With mental illness, our go-to is to categorize them as, 'Oh, they're crazy,' to belittle the problem.

Recognizing chronic sadness may encourage someone to reach out to a friend, family member, or counselor rather than concealing the distress.

I can't properly explain it, but I don't mind admitting I suffered a breakdown.

I think that mental illness is something that is so real.

We can give space to someone's depression. We can love them; we can honor - we can just eat some noodles, we can watch some movies, whatever it is. We can just sit and not talk. That's real stuff. It's a real - I don't know if you call it a disorder, a disease, but it's happening, and we don't need to coach people through with ideologies.

I go in and out of mental funks all the time 'cause it comes with the territory.

I remember, after my first postpartum depression, I didn't know what had happened to me. I was stuck in this gray depression where I just wanted to retreat and pull the covers over my head and weep. My mother and I, we went to a psychiatrist, and he just patted me on the head and told me I had baby blues, which was not helpful, obviously.

It was my last act of love (first words to her mother in the hospital after her first major suicide attempt)

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.

When I was sectioned for six months, that was one of the worst experiences of my life, not being able to go out and have freedom. Having experienced it, it's almost inexplicably awful.

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides

Melancholy Is not, as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind's disease.

Terror acts powerfully upon the body, through the medium of the mind, and should be employed in the cure of madness.

The family unit is the institution for the systematic production of mental illness.

How sick i am! that thought Always comes to me with horror. Is it this strange for everybody? But such fugitive feelings have always been my metier.

As I write, there is a craze for what is called psychoanalysis, or the cure of diseases by explaining to the patient what is the matter with him: an excellent plan if you happen to know what is the matter with him, especially when the explanation is that there is nothing the matter with him.