Nellie Bly Quotes

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

Psychiatry causes so much death.

We have funny ideas about how people in mental institutions act. We think of drooling and people going booga-booga and climbing the wall. These are exceptional cases.

The difference between a healthy person and one who is mentally ill is the fact that the healthy one has all the mental illnesses, and the mentally ill person has only one.

England is nothing but the last ward of the European madhouse, and quite possibly it will prove to be the ward for particularly violent cases.

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.

Mental health is such a complex thing and so difficult to diagnose. What is a mental problem? Who does have mental problems? What's the difference between mental problems and depression and sadness?

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

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.

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.

I was diagnosed with everything from schizophrenia to multiple personality disorder.

We're all crazy and the only difference between patients and their therapists is the therapists haven't been caught yet.

The psychiatric ward was a really creepy place and, hindsight being 20/20, the creepiest thing about it was that I truly belonged there.

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.

My father was a psychiatrist, the medical director of a mental hospital in Scotland, and when I was a student, I took vacation jobs there as a nursing assistant. So I did get to see mental illness, but I don't remember conversations about mental conditions. My father was a cheerful man with a robust attitude to such things.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

Lunacy is always distressing, but sometimes it is dangerous; and when you get it manifested in the head of state, and it has become the policy of a great empire, it is about time that it should be ruthlessly put away.

The state must concern itself with all institutions for those with damaged minds.

The Emperor Francis is already ill. The other leaders [of the nation] are all mad and belong in the lunatic asylum.

Psychiatry: An Instrument of Death

I wasn't inspired by lunatic asylums or anything like that.

People get really irritated by mental illness.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.

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