Eugene V. Debs Quotes

This is how psychiatry has functioned-as a kind of property arm of the government, who can put you away if your husband doesn't like you.

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.

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

Psychiatry: An Instrument of Death

The vast numbers of people who suffer some kind of mental illness under capitalism can either think, 'there is some failing with me, if only I could fit into this system better, if only I were working harder, if only I could enjoy these empty pleasures more, then things would be OK' or 'the problem is with the system that is making me ill.'

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

Involuntary mental hospitalization is like slavery. Refining the standards for commitment is like prettifying the slave plantations. The problem is not how to improve commitment, but how to abolish it

Because my father was a psychiatric nurse, I know my way around the system.

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.

One day, I made a remark that I might work with people with mental illness, and somebody in the press heard it, and it was in the paper. And the more I thought about it and found out about it, the more I thought it was just a terrible situation with no attention. And I've been working on it ever since.

The involuntary character of psychiatric treatment is at odds with the spirit and ethics of medicine itself.

I have a very intimate knowledge of the world of the mentally ill and of life inside of, especially, public hospitals and the way people are treated in there and the way that they try to survive in there.

I had never been near insane persons before in my life, and had not the faintest idea of what their actions were like.

I'm nuts and I know it. But so long as I make 'em laugh, they ain't going to lock me up.

Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can't go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside.

Look, isn't there any way you can just stamp me as not crazy and let me get outta here.

A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.

We couldn't be making as much money, if we had to deal with stranger behaviour. And right now, anybody who slows down our economic productivity, off they go. We have a place for them, the psychiatric institution. That's the main thing, they slow things down.

When I was in college, I worked at a state hospital that was a dumping ground for all manner of the criminally insane and 'mental defectives' as they called them back then. It was a horrible place, like Arkham, mostly in terms of total neglect of the inmates, so I wanted to write an Arkham story.

You can't write a story about a mental hospital in the United States without facing the grand example of 'Cuckoo's Nest.'

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

Sir Rodin convinced my parents to have me committed; they are all in Paris to arrange it.

The incidence of mental illness has not changed by one iota in the last 100 years.

The Emperor Francis is already ill. The other leaders [of the nation] are all mad and belong in the lunatic asylum.

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.