Ramsay MacDonald Quotes

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.

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

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.

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 myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Because my father was a psychiatric nurse, I know my way around the system.

The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they're okay, then it's you.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

They're caught where there's no way out or where you can't see out. What are you going to do about it? I don't have the answer. If I did there would be no insane asylums.

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.

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.

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.

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

Psychiatry causes so much death.

My father was a psychiatrist, the medical director of a mental hospital in Scotland, and when I was a student, I took vacation jobs there as a nursing assistant. So I did get to see mental illness, but I don't remember conversations about mental conditions. My father was a cheerful man with a robust attitude to such things.

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

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

All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

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 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.

I was doing general medicine and during residency, I moonlighted at a psychiatric hospital and became very interested in the medical care of psychiatric patients.

People get really irritated by mental illness.

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America.