Gaby Hoffmann Quotes

Sometimes labeling is only useful, like with OCD. Once you're labeled you can be treated. On other occasions labeling leads to tyranny, like with childhood bipolar disorder in the U.S.

Depression has existed as long as mankind itself, and certainly well before psychiatry, antidepressant medication, or the nation of America itself came into being.

People get really irritated by mental illness.

That's the era we grew up in. It's weak to go to a psychiatrist.

There is no such condition as 'schizophrenia', but the label is a social fact and the social fact a political event.

The dirty little secret of both clinical psychology and biological psychiatry is that they have completely given up on the notion of cure.

The vast majority of people who have mental illness problems never hurt anybody.

You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

There is no common standard for education about diagnosis. Distinguishing between bipolar depression and major depressive disorder, for example, can be difficult, and mistakes are common. Misdiagnosis can be lethal. Medications that work well for some forms of depression induce agitation in others.

There are people who are profoundly mentally ill. But we now have a very weird perspective on mental illness and what it means. I do think that people are overmedicated.

It's like any other part of your body - your mental health gets sick, and it needs treatment.

Diagnoses exist to help get people services they need - but there's no such thing as mental illness. We're all mentally ill.

Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell.

As a kid, I was scared of losing my mind. In Terrell, Texas, where I grew up, there was a guy that would walk down the street talking to himself. And I used to watch him and feel uneasy. And there was a sanitarium where people would say, 'That's where all the crazy people go.' It really sort of frightened me.

My dad is a doctor, a professor of psychiatry, and my mum is a psychotherapist.

I want to show that the dividing lines between sanity and mental illness have been drawn in the wrong place.

The fact is, psychiatric help is not widely available to CIA agents - and as in the military, there is a stigma attached to admitting post-traumatic stress.

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.

There is no such thing as mental illness, hence also no such thing as psychotherapy.

Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists.

Please hear this: There are not 'schizophrenics.' There are people with schizophrenia.

I know people who are medicated and it's their favorite subject.

Psychiatry causes so much death.

Mental illness leaves a huge legacy, not just for the person suffering it but for those around them.

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.