Michelle Lujan Grisham Quotes

I proceed, gentlemen, briefly to call your attention to the present state of insane persons within the Commonwealth, in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens—chained naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.

A considerable number of the prisoners fell even after a short confinement, into a semi-fatuous condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them, and others became violently insane; others, still, committed suicide, while those who stood the ordeal better were not generally reformed, and in most cases, did not recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service to the community.

I don't believe that man was built to be put in a 5-by-7 for 30 years and have his sanity when he comes out if he doesn't find something to escape.

I mean, The New York Times actually had an interesting case recently where they described a detainee who was afraid of the dark, and so he was purposely kept very much in the dark.

The System is rigid, strict and hopeless solitary confinement, and I believe it, in its effects, to be cruel and wrong.

The jails and prisons are the new insane asylums. That’s what we are.

But I spent just two calendar years at Cornell University, though it was covering more than three years of work, and then went to medical school and did become interested in psychiatry, and even helped form a kind of psychiatry club in medical school.

Once you're labeled as mentally ill, and that's in your medical notes, then anything you say can be discounted as an artefact of your mental illness.

How many persons condemned to the horrors of solitary confinement have gone mad - simply because the thinking faculties have lain dormant!

Solitary confinement is too terrible a punishment to inflict on any human being, no matter what his crime. Hardened criminals in the men's prisons, it is said, often beg for the lash instead.

Sometimes, patients with serious mental illness, just as with other serious medical illnesses, require hospitalization. In the absence of available public or private hospital beds, there are few options.

I can help a lot of other people who've gone through the same thing by building a center that will help men and women who don't have the funds to take care of themselves and get the medical treatment.

I might have been just as happy to have been a practicing primary-care doctor. But as a medical student, I had interacted with patients suffering from neurodegeneration or acute clinical schizophrenia. It left an indelible mark on my memory.

Any man who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.

Disease is an experience of a so-called mortal mind. It is fear made manifest on the body.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

I've had years of psychiatry, and I ask about every six months - it's sort of like getting your oil checked - I ask, 'I'm not an actual narcissist, am I?' The learned men of psychiatry assure me that I meet none of the medical criteria.

I am very abnormal... But it wasn't very long ago that I wasn't so abnormal. I was very normal and headed for a lifetime of paying medical bills as proof of my normalcy.

I first wanted to be a psychiatrist. I decided against that in medical school when I discovered that psychiatrists didn't, in reality, do what they did on TV.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

I'm by no means condemning prescription medicine for mental health. I've seen it save a lot of people's lives.

I'm intending to work on juvenile justice reform, sentencing reform, reentry, drug treatment, access to mental health care.

My father was a psychiatrist, the medical director of a mental hospital in Scotland, and when I was a student, I took vacation jobs there as a nursing assistant. So I did get to see mental illness, but I don't remember conversations about mental conditions. My father was a cheerful man with a robust attitude to such things.

My grandmother was a psychiatrist and had shelves full of medical books - I was constantly sneaking looks at some of those. I was fascinated by the descriptions of illnesses and diseases.

Even fictional characters sometimes receive unwarranted medical opinions. Doctors have diagnosed Ebenezer Scrooge with OCD, Sherlock Holmes with autism, and Darth Vader with borderline personality disorder.