135 Quotes by Susannah Cahalan

The anti-psychiatry movement made not-so-strange bedfellows with the civil rights movement. Both were united against a common enemy: the power of “the institution” that decided what was “normal” or “acceptable” in society.

Rosenhan’s study ultimately built on this idea, arguing that the healthy volunteers were deemed insane because they were in an insane asylum, not because of any objective, external truths that psychiatry could point to for a diagnosis.

A two-year government-funded study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry has shown that early intervention after “first breaks” – or the first time experiencing the profound symptoms of serious mental illness – involving antipsychotic medication management combined with a “comprehensive, multi-element approach,” which includes family support and psychotherapy, created the best outcomes.

And belief is a pedestal on which great medicine stands.

We don’t really know how everyday drugs like Tylenol work, nor do we really know what exactly happens in the brain during anesthesia, even though 250 million people go under every year.

What else had I forgotten? What else would come back, knocking me off balance and reminding me how tenuous my grip on reality was?

It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?

Every word counts, every glance counts, every touch counts. The five milligrams of a good medicine is very important, but it’s more effective if you take it in the context of being aware that the healer, the doctor, the nurse, the physical therapist, also have an effect on the patient.

The issue with reliability is that consensus does not necessarily translate to legitimacy.