Top 444 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Psychiatrists - Page 2

Counter to the public's thinking, the celebrities who attract the largest number of stalkers - and typically it's not "if" a celebrity has a stalker, it's "how many" - are neither the most glamorous nor obnoxious, but rather the ones who seem the sweetest and most wholesome. They appear approachable.

People who feel the need to push and control tend to keep their feelings bottled up. As a result, they get shut down or remote, and their feelings come out in twisted, unhealthy ways. They become irritable, passive-aggressive, or volatile, for example.

So if you find out how you prevent yourself from growing, from using your potential, you have away of increasing this, making life richer, making you more and more capable of mobilizing yourself. And our potential is based upon a very peculiar attitude: to live and review every fresh second

The most important thing in changing human behavior is the person's motivation.

There are so many things in human living that we should regard not as traumatic learning but as incomplete learning, unfinished learning.

We all have what might be called a culturally modified brain, and as cultures evolve, they continually lead to new changes in the brain.

Because depression is so thematically powerful and so dark, when it's very severe, it can make people feel not only as if they've lost a loving connection, but as if the whole world is devoid of love. So if we wonder how somebody could take 149 people with him when he commits suicide, one answer can be that depression, when it's most severe, can make people feel that life is completely without value, not just for them but for anyone.

The Work is something living in our hearts and minds. Follow the path, see what changes take place within you, and what light begins to dawn in you.

Originally when we talked about language disorder it was a catastrophic language disorder. It's substantial, and from a treatment standpoint it's okay to keep diluting that term, but from a research standpoint we need to be much more precise. I wish somebody would take up the mantle of just that particular task.

You cannot achieve happiness. Happiness happens and is a transitory stage. Imagine how happy I felt when I got relief from bladder pressure. How long did that happiness last?

Sometimes violence cannot be stopped no matter what we do. But the more peaceful we are, the better chance we have of bringing out the peace in those around us.

Less than 7 hours of sleep at night causes lower overall brain function.

[Hillary Clinton] is giving money to N.I.M.H. [National Institute for Mental Health] ultimately to conduct more experiments on two- to four-year-olds. What they're going to do is conduct a lot of clinical studies which actually drug two- to four-year-olds.

Psychiatrists are usually very well imbued with the clinical role, where helping the sick person is the goal. And that's quite incompatible with the truthseeking role. That's probably true of the other fields, too, but maybe more so of the personalities that gravitate toward psychiatry. They tend to care about people and wish to be helpful.

Sometimes when you push someone, you find out who that person really is.

Maybe the trying is the thing. Maybe it doesn't get better than that. Maybe you never quite get there. And maybe that's okay.

The man Hillary [Clinton] introduced at the meeting goes so far as to say that no amount of trauma to children - or poor parenting or anything in their lives - causes them mental disorders. He says it's all biological and genetic and should be treated by drugs.

Whenever I experience something beautiful, I am with Soul. That moment of inward breath, that pause and awareness of "how beautiful this is" is a prayer of appreciation, a moment of gratitude in which I behold beauty and am one with it.

The first goal is for the clinician to find the patient, and the patient to find the clinician, as both are required for a real alliance.

Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration—studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing—are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s. (254)

Spirituality isn't static. It's an evolving optimism that won't let hardship get the best of you.

Thought changes structure... I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and trauma.

Savant syndrome, characteristically, consists of left hemisphere dysfunction coupled with right hemisphere emergence, and what you see in the savant are basically right brain skills.

Learning is discovering that somethinkg is possible.

The thought of a comedy with paid prostitutes always seemed so silly and purposeless, for a person hired by me could never take the place of my imagination of a 'cruel mistress'.

All connections matter, but the people you depend upon matter most.

I think that's a major reason. Instead of turning in their own lives to philosophy, religion, love, family life, or nature, they think of psychiatry; and today that means the "pill" as an ultimate answer. Also, if you have a desire for social control, "benevolent" control and "benevolent" authority, then again biological psychiatry offers a tremendous opportunity.

Surrender to life today. Don't fight anything. Just enjoy the flow.

I do think a lot of sexual violence stems from experiences in childhood or at puberty. Some people become sadistic after suffering early abuse at the hands of parents, relatives or friends. But for others, the seed is planted in the formative years by the conflation of images of violence with those of sexual arousal. Magazines, TV shows and, especially, slasher movies are masters at doing this.

We can't use the word normal anymore because it's sort of come to be politically incorrect, because normal implies a classification, and categorizations, and exclusions, and so forth. So neurotypical is the word that we now have to use for what I call normal behavior. Neurotypical behaviors are those kinds of behaviors within the range of usual human conduct that do not rise to the level of a disorder.

True growth is a process which one allows to happen rather than causes to happen.

We should probably start searching around a little earlier in our lives for what I call parallel activities, because most of us get entrenched in our careers. And, of necessity, we're earning a living, and it's taking our time, and we're building our résumé, and we want our résumé generally to be our proficiency within our field, because chances are we're going to be applying for another position within the field. So we tend to put off a lot of this sort of what I call parallel discovery until we're either very successful and have the time to do that, or more often until we're retired.

What particular experiences will nourish your soul? No one can prescribe that for you; it is something only you can know and experience. What is satisfying for one person may be just the opposite for someone else. Being out in nature, by the seashore, or on a mountaintop works for me. Communing with nature brings me into soul time. But for others, being out in nature is something to be tolerated, or even an ordeal, or just what you do if you're a member of a family that goes camping.

Psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests.

You see, we don't know what our goals are. We learn our goals only in the process of getting there. "I don't know what I'm building but I'm going to enjoy building it and when I get through building it I'll know what it is." In doing psychotherapy you impress this upon patients. You don't know what a baby is going to become. Therefore, you take good care of it until it becomes what it will.

Because it is a 'use it or lose it' brain, when we develop a map area [in the brain], we long to keep it activated. Just as our muscles become impatient for exercise if we've been sitting all day.

The anterior cingulate fires up as the end result of a series of events. First, estrogen levels fall. Meanwhile, serotonin, the feel-good neurotransmitter, also decreases. The deficiency in serotonin causes the anterior cingulate gyrus to fire up. To make things worse, just about this time the PFC tends to quiet down, which is why women may have a hard time focusing and controlling impulses. So we see emotional difficulties, intensified feelings of sadness, and disturbed sleep.

There is such a thing as genius, and these are people who do not have a formal disability, DSM-IV-type. They may have liberal eccentricities or quirks in their personality, but they don't rise to the level of a disability.

Not only when one does meditation one is getting into a different realm, cognitively, but if you look at the imaging that's done on people when they're meditating, they indeed are entering a different portion of the brain which is activated.

We are, all of us, crippled and twisted. Most of us strive desperately to keep our grotesqueries out of sight and mind. Our suffering is transformed by an alchemy of the soul into addiction, ulcers, strokes, hatred, even war.

Have a dialogue between the two opposing parts and you will find that they always start out fighting each other until we come to an appreciation of difference.

Anxiety is the gap between now and later.

While everyone has a different experience of what is soulful, these experiences do share similar beginnings. We start by giving ourselves permission to be soulful, to take seriously this aspect of ourselves, our soul and our soul needs.

Cognitive therapy seeks to alleviate psychological stresses by correcting faulty conceptions and self-signals. By correcting erroneous beliefs we can lower excessive reactions.

Savant syndrome and autism, I think, are not disorders of brain structure, but they're disorders of brain function.

Any treatment of an illness that does not also minister to the human spirit is grossly deficient.

We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless - a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.

Killers seldom meet the legal standard for insanity, which is quite different from the way most people use the word every day. Killers may be disturbed, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they can't tell right from wrong or are compelled to maim or murder.

Relationships are never chance events.

Above all, the clinician must not shake what little faith the patient has in himself.

Zen is not about eliminating thoughts but illuminating them.

People blush when one of their core truths is revealed.

One of the few times I'm hit emotionally is when I listen to the tapes sadists make of torturing their victims. There the person is currently suffering, you can hear them suffer, and that calls out for an empathic response. But when they're dead, when they're no longer suffering, when it's over, it's hard to feel empathetic for the corpse.

More than 35 percent of the children exposed to a single traumatic event will develop serious mental health problems .. The real crisis of Katrina is the hundreds of thousands of ravaged, displaced and traumatized children.

All of us have worries. We worry because we are intelligent beings. Intelligence predicts, that is its essence; the same intelligence that allows us to plan, hope, imagine, and hypothesize also allows us to worry and anticipate negative outcomes.

Romantic love is sexually passionate love. Romance uses sexual intimacy to create or amplify closeness and mutual fulfillment.

Part of the impetus for my writing is the pain I've seen my friends experience both in their marriage and in their dreams.

What is easiest to see is often overlooked.

Remove the emotional and physical clutter from your life so you can soar.

Everything having to do with human training and education has to be re-examined in light of neuroplasticity.