27 Quotes by Allen Frances

We need either to get the primary care doctors out of psychiatry or to teach them how to do it and give them sufficient time to do it properly.

[W]ay too much treatment is given to the normal "worried well" who are harmed by it; far too little help is available for those who are really ill and desperately need it. Two thirds of people with severe depression don't get treated for it, and many suffering with schizophrenia wind up in prisons. The writing is on the wall.

Because of diagnostic inflation, an excessive proportion of people have come to rely on antidepressants, antipsychotics, antiaxiety agents, sleeping pills, and pain meds.

It is equally dangerous at either extreme - to have either an expanding concept of mental disorder that eliminates normal or to have an expanding concept of normal that eliminates mental disorder.

We don't have to fully perceive or understand the underlying nature of our world to negotiate it well. Our senses and reasoning powers evolved as they did because they work just fine in the everyday, nonphilosophical business of survival. Mental constructs of reality are imperfect, but indispensable, ways to organize the otherwise bewildering phenomena of the world.

Loose diagnosis is causing a national drug overdose of medication. Six percent of our people are addicted to prescription drugs, and there are now more emergency room visits and deaths due to legal prescription drugs than to illegal street drugs.6.

The great unspoken paradox of the arduous process of psychoanalysis is that the best patients are the ones who never really needed it in the first place. Abnormal.

Time heals so well because many of our ills are short-term, situational, and self-limited – our bodies and our minds are programmed to be resilient without any active effort on our part.

Overcoming problems on your own normalizes the situation, teaches new skills, and brings you closer to the people who were helpful. Taking a pill labels you as different and sick, even if you really aren’t. Medication is essential when needed to reestablish homeostasis for those who are suffering from real psychiatric disorder. Medication interferes with homeostasis for those who are suffering from the problems of everyday life.