Helene Deutsch Quotes

Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.

I told the doctor I was overtired, anxiety-ridden, compulsively active, constantly depressed, with recurring fits of paranoia. Turns out I'm normal.

I had an attachment disorder.

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

There is a pleasure in being mad which none but madmen know.

Before I got on full-time medication, I believed that my mental disorder was the reason I could create so much and create well, because it made me crazy. I could go to these dark places and then come out of it and just be human again.

Most men are within a finger's breadth of being mad.

Possibly he knew, as he wrote this, that he was mad - because inside every madman sits a little sane man saying 'You're mad, you're mad.'

Consciousness is a disease.

I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.

I'm not a madman.

I don't know why there aren't more Depression buffs.

Perhaps I'm absolutely bonkers and don't know it. Perhaps I'm psychotically mental.

As I kept having episodes of depression, I realized that it was not a one-off: that I had, well, not a disease, really - more an illness.

I'm not a paranoid schizophrenic.

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

Depression is not a choice.

Neurotics, who cause less distress to themselves and their neighbours than those in the other category, are at war with their own natures. Their right hands are in conflict with their left. Psychotics, and it is those who commit purposeless crimes and prefer death to life, are at war with their environment. Right and left hands strike against the womb that carries them.

...we ask: Why suicide? We search for reasons, causes, and so on.... We follow the course of the life he has now so suddenly terminated as far back as we can. For days we are preoccupied with the question: Why suicide? We recollect details. And yet we must say that everything in the suicide's life- for now we know that all his life he was a suicide, led a suicide's existence- is part of the cause, the reason, for his suicide.

I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible - and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, as a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.

I can only speak from my own experience, and I would say that the depression I experienced feels like a chemical change. When it came over me, when it comes over me, it feels like it's coming over me like a flu.

I am, emphatically. Mental illness triggered by xperimental error.

Persecution mania is still around. In your writing, in your exchanges with people, meeting people who are in Russian affairs, Russian literature, etcetera.

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

Love is a kind of dementia with very precise and oft-repeated clinical symptoms.