Susanna Kaysen Quotes

By the time we hit the streets they were silent and closed in on us, and they had assumed the Nonchalant Look, an expression that said, I am not a nurse escorting six lunatics to the ice cream parlor. But they were, and we were their six lunatics, so we behaved like lunatics.

When I was a visitor to a lunatic asylum I always noticed how well the worst lunatics looked.

In the 1830s, Dorothea Dix revolutionized the care of people with mental illness by taking them out of jails and caring for them in asylums, later known as state hospitals.

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.

There seems little reason to prescribe anti-depressant medication to any but the most severely depressed patients.

So we had psychiatrists and counselors and therapists around the set regularly, especially for those scenes in which Jason would be dealing with a patient to make sure we were doing it all appropriately.

The more choices we give patients affected by depression, the better we will serve them.

There's some kind of dark symbiosis between lunatics and the Postal Service.

... the work of lunatics.

Lunatics with money in America are never mad–just eccentric.

When I look at the patients that I've cared for with mental illness, I know that many of them took years to come forward and tell somebody that they were in pain and that they needed help.

I believe that the healthy people go to therapy. It is the real lunatics who avoid it.

In this country, we've gotten away from institutionalizing and we've moved toward assimilating and drugging the mentally ill.

I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients.

You seem to forget, Miss Flinn, that this is an institution for the insane.

Last week I told my psychiatrist, 'I keep thinking about suicide', and he told me from now I have to pay in advance.

The glass is always half empty. All good comedians are manic-depressive.

It's brilliant, being depressed; you can behave as badly as you like.

I’m not the Hana everyone told me I would be after my cure.

Love: a grave mental disease.

Most people live somewhere on the spectrum of anxiety and depression.

Being here? With you? I've met my subconscious, and he's not that sick.

Suicide is a crime the most revolting to the feelings; nor does any reason suggest itself to our understanding by which it can be justified. It certainly originates in that species of fear which we denominate poltroonery. For what claim can that man have to courage who trembles at the frowns of fortunes? True heroism consists in being superior to the ills of life in whatever shape they may challenge him to combat.

Having to parent your mother or father is a challenge that way too many teens have to deal with. Teens whose parents are dealing with substance abuse, financial hardship, job loss, mental illness and divorce deserve our love, support, and compassion. I wish America would stop judging and criticizing teens and instead, try to understand the battles they have to fight every day.

[I]t is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions.