Eric Kandel Quotes

The brain is the cornerstone of virtually every facet of our lives. I wish we knew more.

Symptoms that may seem psychiatric or psychological can actually be signs of a medical condition.

There are scientists all around the world looking for the genes responsible for bipolar illness and major depression.

The boundary between neurology and psychiatry is becoming increasingly blurred, and it's only a matter of time before psychiatry becomes just another branch of neurology.

Addiction is a neurological disease—a disease of the brain…. No one wakes up in the morning and says today ‘I want to become an addict.’

No amount of therapy will take care of a chemical imbalance of the brain.

We separate problems with the brain into neurological and psychiatric, and it's because it's stigmatised still. Mental illness is still stigmatised. Imagine if we treated people with cancer like that. Just because your personality changes and your behaviour changes, all of a sudden you are put in a different category.

I like to assume that since I drive a car and maintain a respectable credit rating and rarely murder anyone and bury them in the back garden unless they really deserve it, that the fact that I hear voices wont unduly disturb anyone.

The awareness of the damage done by severe mental illness—to the individual himself and to others—and fears that it may return again play a decisive role in many suicides

You have to remember, that insane people can do some horrors themselves. I had committed no crime, though. I hadn't shot anybody. Yet.

First sign of madness, talking to your own head.

Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.

I hear voices in my mind and you're worried that you're the freak,” he laughed.

I listen to the voices.

There is nothing wrong with me. These are really sick people, sick that you can see.

[The] majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems.

Psychotic hallucinations, whether they are visual or vocal, they address you. They accuse you. They seduce you. They humiliate you. They jeer at you. You interact with them.

When a man says that he is Jesus or Napoleon, or that the Martians are after him, or claims something else that seems outrageous to common sense, he is labeled psychotic and locked up in a madhouse. Freedom of speech is only for normal people.

I feel certain that I'm going mad again, I feel we can't go thru another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices

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.

Flirting with madness was one thing; when madness started flirting back, it was time to call the whole thing off.

The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.

We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell.

People of each generation in the twentieth century "were three times more likely to experience depression" than people of the preceding generation.

I think that we're all mentally ill. Those of us outside the asylums only hide it a little better - and maybe not all that much better after all.