Robert Jay Lifton Quotes

So I applied to medical school and received a scholarship at Washington University in St. Louis. Washington University turned out to be a lucky choice. The faculty was scholarly and dedicated and accessible to students.

You don't train someone for all of those years of medical school and residency, particularly people who want to help others optimize their physical and psychological health, and then have them run a claims-processing operation for insurance companies.

There are lots of people with mental health disabilities, and that's just the way their life is; it's not like you see it in the movies.

I studied at the Hebrew University Medical Faculty, graduated, and was an Israel Defense Forces' combat physician on a Navy ship.

Because my father was a psychiatric nurse, I know my way around the system.

I went to medical school after having decided to do so somewhere between my junior and senior year at Harvard - very late. I initially wanted to be an intellectual historian.

I saw my friends in medical school seeming to be more engaged with the real world. That provoked a sort of jealousy, and I decided to go to medical school after all.

Nobody had ever told me junk food was bad for me. Four years of medical school, and four years of internship and residency, and I never thought anything was wrong with eating sweet rolls and doughnuts, and potatoes, and bread, and sweets.

We need to change the culture of this topic and make it OK to speak about mental health and suicide.

When I wrote 'Silver Linings,' I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.

You know what they call the fellow who finishes last in his medical school graduating class? They call him 'Doctor.'

Anyone having to do with medicine will have looked at Frank Netter's art work... I decided I would make him my model... getting my degree in medical illustration and then going on to medical school.

What you need to learn how to do is analyze situations and do differential diagnoses and understand the principle and the concepts rather than learn all the details, and medical school doesn't begin to do that.

While in medical school, I was drafted into the U.S. Army with the other medical students as part of the wartime training program, and naturalized American citizen in 1943. I greatly enjoyed my medical studies, which at the Medical College of Virginia were very clinically oriented.

Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

The mental health conversation is very important to me. I have friends that struggle with various mental illnesses. I've struggled with depression and anxiety. I'm very interested in how we deal with that.

You're taught from the day you start medical school that you're a god, that you can have power over life and death. So when your life starts to crumble, and the highest power you see is looking back in the mirror - and you know that power is flawed - it is very hard to get past that.

When I went to medical school, the term 'digital' applied only to rectal exams.

I attribute the black tones in my films to Stephen King, Tim Burton, Joe Hill and Richard Matheson. However, most of my writing is influenced by mental health. I'm incredibly passionate about shedding light on the stigmas associated with mental illnesses.

I studied in a medical college and qualified myself as a medical graduate.

I am very abnormal... But it wasn't very long ago that I wasn't so abnormal. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy.

Medical school education and post graduate education emphasize thoroughness.

I first wanted to be a psychiatrist. I decided against that in medical school when I discovered that psychiatrists didn't, in reality, do what they did on TV.

Mental health is seen as a massive drag to have to write about - worthy, dull. Something you should 'have' to read / write about.

In 1970, Dean Robert Ebert offered me the Chair of Pathology at Harvard Medical School. I moved to Harvard because I missed the university environment and, more particularly, the stimulating interaction with the eager, enthusiastic, and unprejudiced young minds of the students and fellows.