Benjamin Rush Quotes

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Raze out the written troubles of the brain

The portrayal of post-traumatic stress disorder and things like that felt really big and important.

People who are extremely inside their head, like he was, are caught in a neurosis that goes round and round. Then something will hook them and take them to their end and they can't control it.

I voluntarily inflicted a certain level of insanity on myself.

Mental illness leaves a huge legacy, not just for the person suffering it but for those around them.

In so far as the mind is stronger than the body, so are the ills contracted by the mind more severe than those contracted by the body.

... madness entered my veins.

Such persons are windows through which one looks into terrible worlds.

I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also. People don't develop a mental illness because they are in the happiest of situations, usually. One doctor observed that it was rare when people were rich to become schizophrenic. If they were poor or didn't have too much money, then it was more likely.

I've always had mental problems, so to speak.

Macbeth: How does your patient, doctor? Doctor: Not so sick, my lord, as she is troubled with thick-coming fancies that keep her from rest. Macbeth: Cure her of that! Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, raze out the written troubles of the brain, and with some sweet oblivious antidote cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff which weighs upon her heart. Doctor: Therein the patient must minister to himself.

I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?

Melancholy Is not, as you conceive, indisposition Of body, but the mind's disease.

I shouldn't precisely have chosen madness if there had been any choice, but once such a thing has taken hold of you, you can't very well get out of it.

She'd never imagined it like this-when she thought of someone (a woman like herself)losing her mind, she'd imagined shrieks and wails, hallucinations; but at that moment it had seemed clear that there was another way, far quieter; a way that was numb and hopeless, flat, so much so that an emotion as strong as sorrow would have been a relief.

As her analyst had told her: the deeper buried the distress, the further into the body it went. The digestive system was about as far as it could go to hide.

You cannot escape what you have to deal with inside yourself. It will never bring good things. It will only bring madness.

I much condole with you on your late loss... pains and diseases of the mind are only cured by Forgetfulness;--Reason but skins the wound, which is perpetually liable to fester again.

I hear voices in my mind and you're worried that you're the freak,” he laughed.

She thought she brought a gift of compassion for those exhausted souls who had not received a chest portion from the people who raised them. If compassion and therapy did not work, she could always send her patients to the local pharmacy for drugs.

Family was a fertile breeding ground for the kind of psychological bacteria that warped minds and devoured hope.

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

The mind grows sicker than the body in contemplation of it's suffering.

Vain is the word of a philosopher which does not heal any suffering of man. For just as there is no profit in medicine if it does not expel the diseases of the body, so there is no profit in philosophy either, if it does not expel the suffering of the mind.