Psychiatrist Quotes

The mental vigor of most men is usually maintained at a certain height for the longest time in the forenoon. The evidences of fatigue come on later at this time of day than in the evening, when the store of force in our brain has been already considerably drawn upon by the whole day's work.

It is impossible to win a contest with a helpless opponent since if you win you have won nothing.

In my experience with EEG Biofeedback and ADD, many people are able to improve their reading skills and decrease their need for medication. Also, EEG biofeedback has helped to decrease impulsivity and aggressiveness. It is a powerful tool, in part, because the patient becomes part of the treatment process by taking more control over his own physiological processes.

Man can no more survive psychologically in a psychological milieu that does not respond empathetically to him, than he can survive physically in an atmosphere that contains no oxygen.

The healthier people are, the more they are willing to admit to their limitations and so the more open they are to the possibility of improvement.

Everything you do consciously is preserved for you: everything you do mechanically, since you did not do it, is lost.

The one-sided exploitation of existential guilt is thought reform's trump card, and perhaps its most important source of emotional influence over its participants. Revolving around it are issues most decisive to thought reform's outcome.

Robert Jay Lifton

Natural selection involves no plan, no goal, and no direction — just genes increasing and decreasing in frequency depending on whether individuals with those genes have, relative to other individuals, greater or lesser reproductive success.

Randolph M. Nesse

It can be helpful simply to make a written or mental list of the things you do each day. Then give yourself a mental credit for each of them, however small. This will help you focus on what you have done instead of what you haven't gotten around to do. It may sound simplistic, but it works.

There is a growing tendency amongst the laity to tread not only the broad highways of science, but to explore its more fascinating by-paths.

Jealousy, which serves the struggle for survival, can deteriorate into the envy which draws defeat even from victory.

In all cultures, the family imprints its members with selfhood. Human experience of identity has two elements; a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate. The laboratory in which these ingredients are mixed and dispensed is the family, the matrix of identity.

Salvador Minuchin

The activity of interpreting might be understood as listening for the 'song beneath the words.

To create worry humans elongate fear with anticipation and memory, expand it in imagination and fuel it with emotion. The uniquely human mental process called worrying depends upon having a brain that can reason, remember, reflect, feel, and imagine. Only humans have a brain big enough to do this simultaneously and do it well.

Edward Hallowell (psychiatrist)

The less harshly we judge ourselves, the more accepting we become of others.

Harold H. Bloomfield

The Batman type of story may stimulate children to homosexual fantasies, of the nature of which they may be unconscious.

Fredric Wertham

Over recent years, urbanisation, globalisation and the destruction of local cultures has led to a rise in the prevalence of mental illness in the developing world.

Iain McGilchrist

I wonder how soon we shall be far enough along to have the physician ask: How much and what, if anything, is structural? how much Functional, somatic or metabolic? How much constitutional, psychogenic and social?

Adolf Meyer (psychiatrist)

Being chosen doesn't come out of a state of fullness, it comes out of a state of emptiness.

Edward F. Edinger

Creative action plays with the unknown. But as the child fears the dark... the adult child will be fearful too, faced with the dark world of the unknown mind, with vast concepts looking enormous just beyond the front yard.

Arthur J. Deikman

Imagination coupled with skepticism and an ability to wonder — if you possess these, bountiful nature will hand you some of the secrets out of her inexhaustible store. The pleasure you will experience in discovering truth will repay you for your work; don't expect other compensation, because it may not come.

Immanuel Velikovsky

On earth there are assuredly other things great besides man, though none greater; and in man there are other things great besides mind, though none greater.

The slow compromise, or even surrender, of our fondest hopes is a regular feature of normal human life.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names in research.

Darold Treffert

It's impossible for Suffering to continue reigning unchallenged over the kingdom Suffering will bring the kingdom to ruin or will perish itself. Humanity is beautiful, tender, loving. Look at the striking beauty of that woman's arm, protruding miraculously in the midst of such desolation. Look at the powerful balance of that man's body, standing erect against the sky.

Jacques Stephen Alexis