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"In thatdirection," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: |
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
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"In thatdirection," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: |
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,
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"We must not leave the subject of the hallucinatory mechanism without facing up to the more profound question of why such voices are believed, why obeyed.
For believed as objectively real, they are, and obeyed as objectively real in the face of all the evidence of experience and the mountains of common sense.
Indeed, the voices a patient hears are more real than the doctor's voice. He sometimes says so. 'If that is not a real voice, then I can just as well say that even you are not now really talking to me', said one schizophrenic to his physicians. And another when questioned replied: 'Yes, Sir. I hear voices distinctly, even loudly; they interrupt us at this moment. It is more easy for me to listen to them than to you. I can more easily believe in their significance and actuality, and they do not ask questions.' "
The Origin of Consciousness
in the
Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
by Julian Jaynes. page 94
"Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 22.1 percent of Americans ages 18 and older -- about 1 in 5 adults -- suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year. (Holy smoke. I saw this figure quoted in another article and assumed it was a mistake for "22 percent suffer a mental disorder over the course of a lifetime". 22 percent every year??? At any given time, over 1 in 5 Americans "has a mental problem"?? No wonder the world is going the way it is -- I suppose I should be thankful that things aren't worse.) When applied to the 1998 U.S. Census residential population estimate, this figure translates to 44.3 million people. In addition, 4 of the 10 leading causes of disability in the U.S. and other developed countries are mental disorders -- major depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time."Footnotes in original
"The radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, among others, has said that the growing incidence of mental illness these days may be explained in part by the fact that the world we call real and which we ask people to live within and understand is itself open to question. The environment we live in is no longer connected to the mix of planetary processes which brought us all into being. It is solely the product of human mental processes. It is real, but only in the way that a theatrical play or a fun house is real.... It is an interpretation of reality, it no longer reveals how nature works and it cannot provide much useful information to human beings who seek to see their own lives as part of some wider natural process."
Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
page 87
"His work tends to be dismissed by most psychiatrists; however, droves of mentally ill people insist that this was a man who truly understood how they felt. ... Since Laing refused to view mental illness in biomedical/clinical terms, he has often been labelled as part of the so-called 'antipsychiatry' movement, alongside figures such as David Cooper, Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault. However, Laing vehemently rejected this label."
"We should be offended by Max, not by Meyjes' audacity but by what he reminds us:
that Hitler was not a demonic monster, not supernaturally evil, but that he was entirely human."
"... by "insanity" I mean what insanity is: the acceptance of indiscriminate imaginings that have either only superficial correspondence with reality or none at all."
Nathaniel Lee, 17th c.,
upon the occasion of his being confined to an
asylum for the insane.