Terence McKenna Quotes

People tend to think of psychopaths as criminals. In fact, the majority of psychopaths aren't criminal.

This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever.

Everyone has friends or people they know, while they aren't definitively sociopaths, they have sociopathic qualities.

If you don't know someone who's had a problem with addiction, you will.

I submit that the traditional definition of psychiatry, which is still vogue, places it alongside such things as alchemy and astrology, and commits it to the category of pseudo-science.

Most of my life, I wanted to be a therapist, but then I just decided that I didn't want to be in charge of giving people advice. I want to know everything there is to know about psychology. But a therapist? No.

I'm inclined to believe you need the psychiatrist.

Psychotherapy is the theory that the patient will probably get well anyhow and is certainly a damn fool.

Look at all our old men in pubs. Look at all our young people on drugs.

No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look to.

Drug addiction is tearing our communities and our country apart, and until we decide we're going to think differently about it, until we decide that we're going to invest as a country in prevention and treatment, until we decide that as individuals we're going to step up and do our part to address this epidemic, we're not going to solve this.

I'm not critical of the people who do psychotherapy. The therapists in the trenches have to face an awful lot of the social, political, and economic failures of capitalism. They have to take care of all the rejects and failures. They are sincere and work hard with very little credit, and the HMOs and the pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies are trying to wipe them out. So certainly I am not attacking them. I am attacking the theories of psychotherapy.

the only thing you need to do for now is get some rest and take good care of yourself until you do know the answer

Introversion, at least if extreme, is a sign of mental and spiritual immaturity.

The psychiatrist's office: the only place I can be sure my story will be treated as sad, but interesting.

I think psychotherapy saves lives and is hugely meaningful and I think that one of the unfortunate aspects of prescription drugs working well is that people tend to think that's enough.

If you intend to study the mind, you must have systematic training; you must practice to bring the mind under your control.

Happiness can be just as contagious as misery.

Twenty years ago I might have hired a professional listener, but somewhere along the way I had lost faith in the talking cure. A genteel fraud in my view.

We're talking about the chemical lobotomy. We're talking about the chemical straightjacketing of our children.

I have trouble getting approvals from my heath insurance company for basic antidepressants. And I have the best plan my agency has. I can't get high off this stuff! I'm not going to sell it! Getting my medication is critical. It's me saying, "I just want to live." And their response seems to be, "We agree that it's a matter of life and death; that's why we're declining it." Every time I get a cold, I have Tylenol with codeine coming out the wazoo. But the medication I need to live? Nah.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

I give myself a good cry if I need it, but then I concentrate on all good things still in my life.

Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.

You need to open up your soul and have a weep-a-thon.