135 Quotes by Susannah Cahalan

Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.

No other discipline can force treatment, nor hold people against their will. No other field contends so regularly with a condition like anosognosia, whereby someone who is sick does not know it, requiring physicians to make difficult decisions about how and when to intervene. Psychiatry makes judgments about people – about our personalities, our beliefs, our morality.

Just three years marks the demarcation between a full life and a half existence in an institution or, even worse, an early ending under the cold, hard tombstone.

You have to look backward to see the future.

Which was scarier: using psychiatric labels as a tool of oppression, or the possibility that many of these Soviet psychiatrists actually believed that someone who didn’t support Communism must be crazy?

It’s telling that the more we open our eyes to what we don’t know, the more excitement builds in the research community. Emerging studies exploring the link between the immune system and the brain – as is the case for autoimmune encephalitis – have galvanized the quest to understand how thoroughly the body itself influences and alters behavior, spurring studies of immune-suppressing drugs on people with serious mental illnesses.

My dad and I had gone off to war, fought in the trenches, and against all odds had come out of it alive and intact. There are few other experiences that can bring two people closer than staring death in the face.

Thomas Szasz called mental illness a “myth” and said that the concept of mental illness was “scientifically worthless and socially harmful.” The opening of his most famous book, The Myth of Mental Illness, reads, “There is no such thing as mental illness,” and the book relegates psychiatry to the realm of alchemy and astrology.

Yale researchers found that a key difference in the hallucinatory experiences of psychics and of people with schizophrenia was that the psychics placed the voices in the context of a spiritual or religious experience, and were less disturbed by them.