Darrell Hammond Quotes

I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Treating mental health illness is compassionate and saves money.

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.

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.

For mental illnesses, we need better access to treatment and diagnosis.

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

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

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

Psycho 11 and III say, in effect, there's no way to survive with a psychological problem. If you've got it, the law can keep you locked up because there's no chance for cure.

There is a mystique about psychiatry that people think that you have some kind of a magical lens, you know, Superman's X-ray vision into the soul. One of the reasons I left psychiatry is that I didn't believe that.

I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it.

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. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

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.

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.

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.