Robert Stacy McCain Quotes

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.

The state must concern itself with all institutions for those with damaged minds.

We know how to treat depression, we know how to treat mental illness, and we have not had the political will in our country to make it happen.

We have funny ideas about how people in mental institutions act. We think of drooling and people going booga-booga and climbing the wall. These are exceptional cases.

I wasn't inspired by lunatic asylums or anything like that.

In this country, we've gotten away from institutionalizing and we've moved toward assimilating and drugging the mentally ill.

He's right: They have to put madmen with madmen.

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.

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.

What is the most innocent place in any country? Is it not the insane asylum? These people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all.

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.

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.

I had never been near insane persons before in my life, and had not the faintest idea of what their actions were like.

Could I pass a week in the insane ward at Blackwell's Island? I said I could and I would. And I did.

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.

Female hysteria is a subject I'm very fond of. I always try to bring it in somewhere. For me, it is the finest part of the line between comedy and tragedy.

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

I know people who are medicated and it's their favorite subject.

He was certainly in a confused state. I used to go and visit him in Callan Park. They were really - to me they were the best poets those two writing in those days but it wasn't very encouraging because, well, they weren't getting far were they?

Yes, this is 21st-century America. Where we have better means to treat mental illness than ever before, but choose to let the insane people decide to get it or not.

It used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me. Because, quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is, 'You want to know what's wrong with me.'

Being sectioned was the best thing that ever happened to me.

I definitely think that prescription drugs, like antidepressants, are prescribed so cavalierly, anyone can get anything, but I need it. I do think that it needs to work hand and hand with therapy.