Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses t...o regard, as mentally unwell.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is thus that the few rare lucid well-disposed people who have had to struggle on the earth find themselves at certain hours of ...the day or night in the depth of certain authentic and waking nightmare states, surrounded by the formidable suction, the formidable tentacular oppression of a kind of civic magic which will soon be seen appearing openly in social behavior.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In a normal person the motor and sensory nervous systems act as the windows of the individual personality.... [ellipsis in origina...l] The broken, many-stained and pictorial windows through which the light is struggling under disadvantages to harmonize itself with the physical world at large are found in three classes of persons--the mentally deficient, the morally deficient, and the insane. In these, the light is there, but the images, as in a broken cathedral window, are more or less shattered and confused.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Within Western medicine, physically ill people approach medical helpers in a manner much different from the psychologically ill. P...hysically ill people bring sick bodies to physicians; emotionally ill people bring sick souls to psychotherapists. Differences in these two forms of helping are visible even in the language; the person in need of medical help is always a "patient," while the person in need of psychotherapy is often a "client." Each form of helping has a particular way of approaching the person needing help. Medical patients are treated, taken care of, and made better by the doctor. Psychotherapy clients must be actively engaged in their healing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Down in the living room I have a clock which is called a "four-hundred-day" clock, which is supposed to run 400 days without windi...ng. This feat seems to be accomplished by arranging four large cherries on a rotating stem which hangs out of the works of the clock (clearly visible through the glass cover) and they go slowly round one way and then slowly round the other until the person who is watching them has gone mad.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When one of us dies of cancer, loses her mind, or commits suicide, we must not blame her for her inability to survive an ongoing p...olitical mechanism bent on the destruction of that human being. Sanity remains defined simply by the ability to cope with insane conditions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A small voice issued from a bed placed in utter darkness where no ray of light was admitted, complaining of bad nerves, low spirit...s, and terrible dreams.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A major difference between witches and psychotherapists is that witches see the mental health of women as having important politic...al consequences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
On the whole, "organic" illnesses of the body are viewed as a misfortune over which the victim has little control. Not so for "men...tal" illnesses. These diseases of the mind become diseases of the "self." We (our "selves") can distance ourselves from our "bodily" illnesses: "my leg is broken" or "my heart is failing." But, because of mind-body dualism, our mind is our self. "My mind is sick" is not differentiated psychologically from "I am sick." We cannot distance ourselves, take a detached view of our minds: we are our minds. When a disease affects brain function, the afflicted person and those around him feel that the "self" must be somehow in control of the disorder of "self."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness ...and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »