Havelock Ellis Quotes

When I was a visitor to a lunatic asylum I always noticed how well the worst lunatics looked.

I was never in a mental institution for a long time. I was in psych wards.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

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

I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.

There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.

I would say being in that institution - that psyche ward, or whatever it was. That was really creepy because it was a real place from like the early 1900s.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

I have one thing to say about the mental asylum. I've romanticized two things in my life, and both have fallen short. One is being in a mental asylum. Really, really not as fun as you think it is.

I was doing general medicine and during residency, I moonlighted at a psychiatric hospital and became very interested in the medical care of psychiatric patients.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.

Prison's a walk in the park compared with being sectioned, mate, it really is.

Psychiatrists don't solve anything from one day to the next.

We must stop criminalizing mental illness. It's a national tragedy and scandal that the L.A. County Jail is the biggest psychiatric facility in the United States.

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.

Any man who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

Look, isn't there any way you can just stamp me as not crazy and let me get outta here.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

When I was in college, I worked at a state hospital that was a dumping ground for all manner of the criminally insane and 'mental defectives' as they called them back then. It was a horrible place, like Arkham, mostly in terms of total neglect of the inmates, so I wanted to write an Arkham story.

I've spent my life visiting a handful of people who are very close to me when they've been committed to one hospital or another in New York.

I think, when it comes to psychiatry, that a lot of people are overmedicated. I think when it comes to ECT a lot of people go through too much. I think there's a lot of guesswork in psychiatry.

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.