135 Quotes by Susannah Cahalan

Patients are often taken by ambulance to emergency rooms, where they are boarded in general hospitals that lack psychiatric care.

The government policies that closed these institutions did not embed people more deeply into the community – they pushed them further outside onto our streets and into our homeless shelters, even, as we’ll see, into our prisons.

Later that next night, I had an epiphany. Forget bipolar disorder: it was the antiseizure medication Keppra. The Keppra must be causing my insomnia, forgetfulness, anxiety, hostility, moodiness, numbness, loss of appetite. It didn’t matter that I had been on the drug for only twenty-four hours. It was all the Keppra. An Internet search proved it. These were all side effects of that toxic drug.

We are all hanging on by a very thin thread, and some of us won’t survive our fall.

The history of psychiatry is a minefield.” Reader: Beware of shrapnel.

I saw a storminess in her heavily lidded eyes, but a deadness also that jolted me into the past.

Too much light has come out of my darkness.

Researchers have estimated that as many as a third of people with schizophrenia display some immune dysfunction, though what that means about the underlying cause of the illness remains unclear.

Parkinson’s patients will release dopamine, sometimes even enough to control their involuntary movements, when they believe they’re getting real L-Dopa drug treatments.