Psychiatric Diagnosis Quotes

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic "causes" of these "conditions"?

I thought you were sane," I said, "but you're just as crazy as the rest of them.

There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

I'm not crazy. My mother had me tested!

Everybody believes in psychiatry; it's supposed to be for our own good. Let psychiatry prove that anybody has an illness, and I'd concede, but there is no physical proof.

Psychiatry is a pseudoscience.... You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do...Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt, you don't even -you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.

you may be right, I may be crazy, but it just might be a lunatic you're looking for

Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.

I mean what they and their hired psychiatrists call delusional systems. Needless to say, ‘delusions’ are always officially defined. We do not have to worry about questions of real or unreal. They only talk out of expediency. It’s the system that matters. How the data arrange themselves inside it. Some are consistent, others fall apart.

Now, I'm no doctor, but I am on TV. And in my professional opinion, George W. Bush is a paranoid schizophrenic. ...

I don't know what a shrink would call me. I don't want to know.

Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.

Once the notion of depression had begun to dominate the diagnostic armamentarium, it became but a matter of time before patients with relatively mild disorders of mood or anxiety would be entered into it.

When I taught writing classes to psychiatric patients, I met people whose stories of manic highs and immobilizing lows appeared to be textbook descriptions of classic bipolar disorder. I met other patients who had been diagnosed with myriad disorders. No doctor seemed to agree about what they actually suffered from.

I regard psychiatry as fifty percent bunk, thirty percent fraud, ten percent parrot talk, and the remaining ten percent just a fancy lingo for the common sense we have had for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years, if we ever had the guts to read.

I have a chemical imbalance that, in its most extreme state, will lead me to a mental hospital.

Psychiatric expert testimony: mendacity masquerading as medicine.

The man is either crazy or he is a poet.

The discovery of phobias by psychiatrists has done much to clear the atmosphere. Whereas in the old days a person would say: 'Let's get the heck out of here!' today she says: 'Let's get the heck out of here! I've got claustrophobia.

I'm still suffering from shock from the last war. I was almost drafted! Luckily I was wounded while taking the physical. When I reached the psychiatrist, I said, Give me a gun, I'll wipe out the whole German Army in five minutes. He said, You're crazy! I said, Write it down!

I've tried many times to set out the case against the wicked fantasy of 'ADHD,' which usually earns me nothing but ignorant rage in return.

So I had a choice between going to a jail or going to a bughouse like a nice young middle-class student. So I chose to go to a very polite mental hospital. When I left eight months later, they said, 'You were never psychotic. You were just an average neurotic.'