A Quote by R. D. Laing

No one has schizophrenia, like having a cold. The patient has not "got" schizophrenia. He is schizophrenic.

R. D. Laing

Quote Topics

Cold Got Having Like Patient Schizophrenia Schizophrenic

Quote Author

R. D. Laing
Scottish - Psychologist
October 7, 1927 - August 23, 1989

If an autoimmune disease can create symptoms that look exactly like schizophrenia, that raises the question, what is schizophrenia? And are there forms of schizophrenia that are caused by other types of autoimmune disease?

Susannah Cahalan

Schizophrenia --its nature, etiology, and the kind of therapy to use for it--remains one of the most puzzling of the mental illnesses. The theory of schizophrenia presented here is based on communications analysis, and specifically on the Theory of Logical Types. From this theory and from observations of schizophrenic patients is derived a description, and the necessary conditions for, a situation called the "double bind"--a situation in which no matter what a person does, he "can't win." It is hypothesized that a person caught in the double bind may develop schizophrenic symptoms

Gregory Bateson

The schizophrenic mind is not so much split as shattered. I like to say schizophrenia is like a waking nightmare.

Elyn Saks

I'd like to create a lovable character for schizophrenia; it doesn't have a celebrity spokesperson because by the time somebody's schizophrenic they've lost all their teeth.

Maria Bamford

Schizophrenia is the name for a condition that most psychiatrists ascribe to patients they call schizophrenic.

R. D. Laing

We do not know with any of these neuropsychiatric disorders what the ultimate basis is. Let's say you could find that too much of protein X was involved in schizophrenia. Would you then know what schizophrenia is? You would not.

Paul Greengard

Psychiatrists look for twisted molecules and defective genes as the causes of schizophrenia, because schizophrenia is the name of a disease. If Christianity or Communism were called diseases, would they then look for the chemical and genetic "causes" of these "conditions"?

Thomas Szasz

I used to worry when I was a teenager, even into my twenties, after I'd heard something about schizophrenia and how people just suddenly become schizophrenic that I was insane.

Brad Warner

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons.

Jonathan Michel Metzl

When I speak of divisions greater than gender or race, I say that because it is so unimaginable. I can imagine what it would be like to be another race. Or to be a man - I could draw that up in my mind and experience it. Schizophrenia? We're all schizophrenic in our dreams. Depression? Most of us have been at least a little depressed and can imagine it. But not having a conscience? Conscience is so profound and so basic in most of us.

Martha Stout

An old joke puts its thus, "when a man speaks to a god its prayer , when a god speaks to a man its schizophrenia"... Many people hear voices without suffering any of the debilitating and dysfunctional effects associated with schizophrenia, some treat these as sources of inspiration of develop religious ideas around them, others become mediums or occultists.

Peter J. Carroll

Vulnerable is a catch-all word like "love" and "schizophrenia."

Jean Houston

There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.

We're all divided souls, we've got two natures in us, You measure schizophrenia not by the fact that you're divided but how well the divisions speak to one another.