Ann Nocenti Quotes

I was never in a mental institution for a long time. I was in psych wards.

I always made a point of telling the doctors I was sane, and asking to be released, but the more I endeavored to assure them of my sanity, the more they doubted it.

A first visit to a madhouse is always a shock.

There's a schizoid streak within the family anyway so I dare say that I'm affected by that. The majority of the people in my family have been in some kind of mental institution, as for my brother he doesn't want to leave. He likes it very much.

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

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.

I would say being in that institution - that psyche ward, or whatever it was. That was really creepy because it was a real place from like the early 1900s.

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.

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

The psychiatric ward was a really creepy place and, hindsight being 20/20, the creepiest thing about it was that I truly belonged there.

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.

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

All I'm doing is rearranging the curtains in the insane asylum.

I was doing general medicine and during residency, I moonlighted at a psychiatric hospital and became very interested in the medical care of psychiatric patients.

I was in a mental hospital. That's all I wanna say. I don't wanna say anything more.

I do not oppose the insane asylum - but I abhor and condemn the cutthroat system that robs man of his reason, drives him to insanity and makes the lunatic asylum an indispensable adjunct to every civilized community.

I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naivety has no peer but my own.

The insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap. It is easy to get in, but once there it is impossible to get out.

America turns its back on the mentally ill. It likes to think it doesn't, but it does.

There are people who are profoundly mentally ill. But we now have a very weird perspective on mental illness and what it means. I do think that people are overmedicated.

I wasn't inspired by lunatic asylums or anything like that.

I knew for years I wanted to write a novel that addressed the personal trauma of my older sister, who suffered - and still suffers - from mental illness. For a long time I imagined - and I know it's absurd - that she was an indirect casualty of the Vietnam War.