Linus Torvalds Quotes

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

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.

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.' 'I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul.

I think it's only right that crazy people should have their own city, but I cannot for the life of me see why a sane person would want to go there.

You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.

People get really irritated by mental illness.

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

When they are treated, the seriously mentally ill aren't more violent than the general population. If untreated, though, they are.

Literary dementia seems dated now, but there was a time when a month in the funny farm was as de rigueur for budding writers as an M.F.A. is now. To be sent away was a badge of honor; to undergo electroshock, a glorious martyrdom.

Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

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.

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

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 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.

When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.

Pound's crazy. All poets are. They have to be. You don't put a poet like Pound in the loony bin.

Because I teach and write about depression and bipolar illness, I am often asked what is the most important factor in treating bipolar disorder. My answer is competence. Empathy is important, but competence is essential.

I'm by no means condemning prescription medicine for mental health. I've seen it save a lot of people's lives.

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

Deinstitutionalization has succeeded in decreasing the overall number of hospital beds, but an unforeseen consequence has been the proportional increase in the number of people with mental illnesses housed in the criminal justice system. Worse, once imprisoned, people with mental illness are shown to have much longer incarcerations than other inmates, primarily because a prison environment and lack of treatment aggravate the very illness that has led to their objectionable or antisocial behavior.

Public safety is too important to be left to psychiatry.