135 Quotes by Susannah Cahalan

Their organ of study is the “mind,” the seat of personality, identity, and selfhood, so it should not be surprising that the study of it is more impenetrable than understanding, say, the biology of skin cancer or the mechanics of heart disease.

The people who needed help the most were left behind as analysts comfortably cherry-picked their patients – mostly wealthy, white, and not very sick.

Unlike Nellie Bly and others before and after, David Rosenhan’s data was, at last, unimpeachable.

According to a now infamous 1962 Midtown Manhattan study based on two-hour interviews with sixteen hundred people in the heart of the city, only 5 percent of the population were deemed mentally “well.” The whole world was suddenly crazy, and psychiatrists were their caped crusaders.

Rosenhan was interested in diagnosis, and that’s fine, but you’ve got to respect and accept the data, even if the data are not supportive of your preconceptions.

You can even augment the effects of a placebo with a caring, supportive environment, where the patient not only believes in the drug, but also believes in the doctor.

Psychiatrists like Nancy Andreasen saw this as a step forward for patients who “no longer must carry the burden of blame and guilt because they have become ill.” And that the world should “behave towards a patient just as they would if he had cancer or heart disease.

They were determined to create a psychiatry that looked more like the rest of medicine, in which patients were understood to have diseases and in which doctors identified the diseases and then targeted them by treating the body, just as medicine identified and treated cardiac illness, thyroiditis, and diabetes,” wrote Tanya Marie Luhrmann in Of Two Minds.

I am far, far away from here. I am myself again.