Darrell Hammond Quotes

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

Mr. [Muhammad Ali] Jinnah is a psychopathic case.

I've never said I have OCD, as I haven't been diagnosed.

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.

There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.

After a century of studying schizophrenia, the cause of the disorder remains unknown.

I would say I see myself as a psychiatrist in remission.

If I had my way everyone would have a psychiatrist. When the brain is sick and you must throw up, you do it by being purged in a psychiatrist's office.

I'm not a psychiatrist.

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 had never been near insane persons before in my life, and had not the faintest idea of what their actions were like.

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

When I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder the year I turned 50, it was certainly a shock. But as a journalist, knowing a little bit about a lot of things, I didn't suffer the misconception that depression was all in my head or a mark of poor character. I knew it was a disease, and, like all diseases, was treatable.

Psychiatry causes so much death.

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

A neurotic is a man who builds a castle in the air. A psychotic is the man who lives in it. A psychiatrist is the man who collects the rent.

What's the difference between a personality disorder and a personality? You know? That's what I wanna know!

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.

Schizophrenia is a successful attempt not to adapt to pseudo- social realities.

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

He stares at me, and then leans back in his chair. "He's ill, Jacob." I say nothing. "He's a paragon schnitzophonic." "He's what?!" "Paragon schnitzophonic," repeats Uncle Al. "You mean paranoid schizophrenic?" "Sure. Whatever. But the bottom line is he's mad as a hatter.

There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war.

A schizophrenic is a person who already has a natural tendency to absent himself from this world.

The schizophrenic may indeed be mad. He is mad. He is not ill. I have been told by people who have been through the mad experience how what was then revealed to them was veritable manna from Heaven. The person's whole life may be changed, but it is difficult not to doubt the validity of such vision. Also, not everyone comes back to us again.

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