135 Quotes by Susannah Cahalan

Our minds have the incredible capacity to both alter the strength of connections among neurons, essentially rewiring them, and create entirely new pathways. (It makes a computer, which cannot create new hardware when its system crashes, seem fixed and helpless).

Two million Americans had dropped acid by 1970, getting a glimpse of the “other side” and joining the “revolution by consciousness” – convinced, as Joan Didion wrote, “that truth lies on the far side of madness.

The brain is a physical organ and physical disease occurs within the brain. Why does that make it a ‘psychiatric condition’ instead of a physical ‘disease’?” he wrote. “What am I missing?” He.

We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.

But once you’ve come face-to-face with real madness and returned, once you’ve found yourself to be a bridge between the two worlds, you can never turn your back again.

I may be gone, but I’m not forgotten.

Many research psychiatrists I’ve interviewed liken DSM diagnoses to our understanding of headaches – we have symptoms with no knowledge of the underlying cause.

An interest in the connection between the gut and the brain has led to some fascinating research on probiotics, which have been shown to reduce mania and some of the more robust symptoms of schizophrenia.

But what you didn’t get with Freud was a focus on diagnosis. In fact, his followers practiced “extreme diagnostic nihilism.