Popular Psychiatry Quotes

In fact, in the early twentieth century it became popular for psychiatrists to write books on Jesus’s psychological condition: the majority opinion among these writers was that he was a paranoid schizophrenic.

Dr. Spencer Eth, who ran the psychiatry department at the now-defunct St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village, was curious where survivors had turned for help, and early in 2002, together with some medical students, he conducted a survey of 225 people who had escaped from the Twin Towers. Asked what had been most helpful in overcoming the effects of their experience, the survivors credited acupuncture, massage, yoga, and EMDR, in that order.1 Among rescue workers, massages were particularly popular.

In the field of medicine, Galen, the Alexandrian scientist, propounded a view that is still around, nowadays called 'alternative medicine.'It was taught in many medical schools until the mid-nineteenth century and now is becoming popular again. Human health is the result of the balance of humors, or temperaments. Physical exercise, bathing, and herbal remedies keep the four temperaments in balance, or restore balance, in case one, such as melancholia (depression), comes to dominate. Today's transactional psychiatry teaches much the same medical doctrine as Galen did.

Our quick tour through the many dimensions of cognitive and emotional dysfunction makes it plain why the practice of psychiatry has changed so profoundly over the past thirty years. The familiar caricature of the bearded and monocled Freudian analyst probing his reclining patient for memories of toilet training gone awry and parentally directed lust is now an anachronism, as is the professional practice of that mostly empty and confabulatory art. How such an elaborate theory could have become so widely accepted—on the basis of no systematic evidence or critical experiments, and in the face of chronic failures of therapeutic intervention in all of the major classes of mental illness (schizophrenia, mania and depression)—is something that sociologists of science and popular culture have yet to fully explain.

The nasty racism that infused the progressive eugenics of Margaret Sanger and others has largely melted away. But liberal fascists are still racist in their own nice way, believing in the inherent numinousness of blacks and the permanence of white sin, and therefore the eternal justification of white guilt. While I would argue that this is bad and undesirable, I would not dream of saying that today's liberals are genocidal or vicious in their racial attitudes the way Nazis were. Still, it should be noted that on the postmodern left, they do speak in terms Nazis could understand. Indeed, notions of "white logic" and the "permanence of race" were not only understood by Nazis but in some cases pioneered by them. The historian Anne Harrington observes that the "key words of the vocabulary of postmodernism (deconstructionism, logocentrism) actually had their origins in antiscience tracts written by Nazi and protofascist writers like Ernst Krieck and Ludwig Klages. The first appearance of the word Dekonstrucktion was in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by Hermann Goring's cousin. Many on the left talk of destroying "whiteness" in a way that is more than superficially reminiscent of the National Socialist effort to "de-Judaize" German society. Indeed, it is telling that the man who oversaw the legal front of this project, Carl Schmitt, is hugely popular among leftist academics. Mainstream liberals don't necessarily agree with these intellectuals, but they do accord them a reverence and respect that often amount to a tacit endorsement.

In 1974 Freedman and Kaplan’s Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry stated that “incest is extremely rare, and does not occur in more than 1 out of 1.1 million people.”16 As we have seen in chapter 2 this authoritative textbook then went on to extol the possible benefits of incest: “Such incestuous activity diminishes the subject’s chance of psychosis and allows for a better adjustment to the external world. . . . The vast majority of them were none the worse for the experience.” How misguided those statements were became obvious when the ascendant feminist movement, combined with awareness of trauma in returning combat veterans, emboldened tens of thousands of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, domestic abuse, and rape to come forward. Consciousness-raising groups and survivor groups were formed, and numerous popular books, including The Courage to Heal (1988), a best-selling self-help book for survivors of incest, and Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery (1992), discussed the stages of treatment and recovery in great detail.

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

This generation grew up constantly reminded that they lived in the greatest country in the world, the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all its citizens. Yet, as they matured, members of this generation found a disturbing disparity between this popular American self-image and actual reality. They found that many people in this land—women and certain racial minorities—were, by law and custom, definitely not free. By the sixties the new generation was inspecting closely, and many were finding other disturbing aspects of the United States’ self-image—for instance, a blind patriotism that expected young people to go into a foreign land to fight a political war that had no clearly expressed purpose and no prospect of victory. Just as disturbing was the culture’s spiritual practice. The materialism of the previous four hundred years had pushed the mystery of life, and death, far into the background. Many found the churches and synagogues full of pompous and meaningless ritual. Attendance seemed more social than spiritual, and the members too restricted by a sense of how they might be perceived and judged by their onlooking peers. As the vision progressed, I could tell that the new generation’s tendency to analyze and judge arose from a deep-seated intuition that there was more to life than the old material reality took into account. The new generation sensed new spiritual meaning just beyond the horizon, and they began to explore other, lesser known religions and spiritual points of view. For the first time the Eastern religions were understood in great numbers, serving to validate the mass intuition that spiritual perception was an inner experience, a shift in awareness that changed forever one’s sense of identity and purpose. Similarly the Jewish Cabalist writings and the Western Christian mystics, such as Meister Eckehart and Teilhard de Chardin, provided other intriguing descriptions of a deeper spirituality. At the same time, information was surfacing from the human sciences—sociology, psychiatry, psychology, and anthropology—as well as from modern physics, that cast new light on the nature of human consciousness and creativity. This cumulation of thought, together with the perspective provided by the East, gradually began to crystallize into what was later called the Human Potential Movement, the emerging belief that human beings were presently actualizing only a small portion of their vast physical, psychological, and spiritual potential I watched as, over the course of several decades, this information and the spiritual experience it spawned grew into a critical mass of awareness, a leap in consciousness from which we began to formulate a new view of what living a human life was all about,

The suffering that accompanies nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, cough, fever, fatigue, pain, anxiety, and low mood motivates escape from a current bad situation and avoidance of future similar situations. Individuals who do not experience physical pain accumulate injuries and usually die by early adulthood. People who don’t feel bad when pursuing unreachable goals spend their lives in contented useless efforts. More low mood might help their genes, but a clinic to boost low mood would be about as popular as a clinic to help people feel more anxious.

The Age of Schizophrenia” (an essay bemoaning the ever-growing numbers of patients with that specific diagnosis, a widely discussed trend in the late 1930s) and “But Is the World Going Mad?” (an essay arguing that the ever-growing number of patients in mental hospitals was not cause for alarm, but rather proof of psychiatry’s progress in identifying and treating mental illness), I come away with a strong feeling that Mom’s worries about mental illness in her own family would have centered around two popular notions from that era:

Hilde Bruch (1904–1984) is probably the most influential and important figure in the field of eating disorders (Skårderud 2013). Immensely productive, she was a prolific author, both for scientific and popular audiences (Lidz 1994; Bruch 1996). She wrote extensively on various topics in psychiatry and psychotherapy, on obesity and eating disorders in general, but is probably best known for her work on anorexia nervosa. She developed new vistas in the understanding and conceptualization of this particular psychopathology. Hilde Bruch was also a pioneer in developing the psychotherapeutic approach towards such disorders, with emphasis on curiosity and a not-knowing stance (Bruch 1970). Her ways of proposing psychotherapeutic enterprises and stances for eating disorders are highly coincident with a mentalizing stance. Her concepts of “naïve stance” and “constructive use of ignorance” are synonymous to the not-knowing position so central in mentalization-based treatments. And,