Top 100 Quotes About Psychosis
#1. [G]enius is a true degenerative psychosis belonging to the group of moral insanity . . .
Cesare Lombroso
#2. Severe mental illness like psychosis can lead to a tragedy like this - that people can see things that aren't real and hear things that aren't real and believe things that aren't real, and act in that distorted reality.
Andrea Yates
#3. Insanity and psychosis can no longer be respected as meaningful [terms] - but are used by limited individuals in positions of social power to describe ways of behaving and thinking that are alien, threatening, and obscure to them.
Seymour Krim
#4. I lay aside the papers. Really, it is beyond hypocrisy; it is beyond even lying: it has become a psychosis.
Robert Harris
#5. At the individual level, if we can identify the psychological mechanisms linking adverse environments to psychosis (and there has been a lot of progress with this despite minimal funding) we should be able to devise more effective interventions for those who are already ill.
Richard Bentall
#6. If the Internet has given us anything, it's some idea of how much psychosis goes undiagnosed.
Jan Burke
#7. Other people have a nationality. The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.
Brendan Behan
#8. I don't believe in, and I am a devout non-believer, in playing new songs live if the subjected and pathetic crowd has not heard them before because I consider it like mass psychosis and genocidal.
Peter Steele
#9. To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis.
Maggie Nelson
#10. We think of bulimia and anorexia as either a bizarre psychosis, or as a quirky little habit, a phase, or as a thing that women just do. We forget that it is a violent act, that it bespeaks a profound level of anger toward and fear of the self.
Marya Hornbacher
#11. A transference neurosis corresponds to a conflict between ego and id, a narcissistic neurosis corresponds to that between between ego and super-ego, and a psychosis to that between ego and outer world.
Sigmund Freud
#12. My safe, safe psychosis is broken.
It was hard.
It was made of stone.
It covered my face like a mask.
But it has cracked.
Anne Sexton
#13. I often joke that I straddle psychosis and neurosis, and that being an artist keeps me in the middle, so I can work between the two.
Sam Taylor-Wood
#14. Freud thought that a psychosis was a waking dream, and that poets were daydreamers too, but I wonder if the reverse is not as often true, and that madness is a fiction lived in like a rented house
William H Gass
#16. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin. Like
Shirley Jackson
#17. At one time, the treatment for a certain kind of psychosis had been to push an ice pick up through the orbit of the eye, into the frontal lobe; the ice pick was then stirred around until it reduced the problematic brain tissue to non-functioning porridge.
Alastair Reynolds
#18. When we speak to God, we call it prayer; when God speaks back, we call it psychosis!
Lily Tomlin
#19. Were I to put myself on ... one of those online dating things, I would not include in my profile that I'm regularly hospitalized for psychosis. But I do know that when I get really bad, there is a place for me to go where I will feel better.
Marya Hornbacher
#20. Even in my first analysis of a depressive psychosis, I was immediately struck by its structural similarity with obsessional neurosis.
Karl Abraham
#21. She is determined to learn to anticipate her worst bouts of psychosis, and head them off before they overwhelm her. "I'm trying to recognize when it's coming on," she says, "so I can get out of the way or at least drop to the ground like you would when caught in the crossfire of a shootout." (233)
Michael Greenberg
#22. All these stories are grist to the mill of the government because they build up a very useful war psychosis.
Helen Suzman
#23. Drugs induce paranoia and psychosis in people who have never taken any.
Terence McKenna
#24. The luxury of being half-asleep, exploring the fringes of psychosis in safety.
Ian McEwan
#25. Homosexuals die decades younger than heterosexuals, from a host of maladies. They suffer mental problems ranging from depression to psychosis, and have suicide rates many times that of heterosexuals.
David Duke
#26. It has been said of dreams that they are a 'controlled psychosis,' or, put another way, a psychosis is a dream breaking through during waking hours.
Philip K. Dick
#27. Conventional psychiatry has emphasized the genetic roots of psychosis based on the claim that twin and other studies show that schizophrenia is 80% heritable, which means that 80% of the cause is genetic.
Richard Bentall
#28. What does borderline personality mean, anyhow? It appears to be a way station between neurosis and psychosis: a fractured but not disassembled psyche. Though to quote my post-Melvin psychiatrist: "It's what they call people whose lifestyles bother them.
Susanna Kaysen
#29. In TheColorful Apocalypse, Greg Bottoms explores the frontier between inspiration and psychosis with the expressive power, the passionate fervor, and the faithfully unflinching honesty for which his work is deservedly known. This book is incisive, startling, and often genuinely moving.
Madison Smartt Bell
#30. Why America has never made the connection between tract housing and psychosis is beyond me
Jackson Tippett McCrae
#31. Up and down' is Irish for anything at all
from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.
Anne Enright
#32. Got nothing to say now, huh? Figures. She snorted. Hearing voices was one thing, but talking back to them probably hiked her up to a whole new level of psychosis. Awesome.
Laura Kaye
#33. Marijuana gives rise to insanity
not in its users but in the policies directed against it. A nation that sentences the possessor of a single joint to life imprisonment without parole but sets a murderer free after perhaps six years is in the grips of a deep psychosis.
Eric Schlosser
#34. Bipolar illness, manic depression, manic-depressive illness, manic-depressive psychosis. That's a nice way of saying you will feel so high that no street drug can compete and you will feel so low that you wish you had been hit by a Mack truck instead.
Christine F. Anderson
#35. From the contemplative point of view, being lost in thoughts of any kind, pleasant or unpleasant, is analogous to being asleep and dreaming. It's a mode of not knowing what is actually happening in the present moment. It is essentially a form of psychosis.
Sam Harris
#36. Psychosis can happen out of the blue, to anyone, and no one knows why. Not even the best doctors on the planet.
And that's why Mom is always so afraid. If we don't know what made me sick in the first place, how can anyone guarantee I won't flip out again?
Jeannine Garsee
#37. I think actors who know their job know that's how you do it. You don't show up and make people miserable. That poor grip who's standing there, he just wants to feed his family. He doesn't need to hear about your psychosis on life and love and death.
Charlize Theron
#39. Religious creeds encourage some of the craziest kinds of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors and favor severe manifestations of neurosis, borderline personality states, and sometimes even psychosis.
Albert Ellis
#40. Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.
Brad Holland
#41. My experience is that when one is in psychosis, you're on a mission and nothing is going to stop you. At some level your brain is telling you you probably shouldn't be doing this, but you're on a mission.
Elyn Saks
#42. I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
Jeanette Winterson
#43. This is the psychosis of being a human being - the things that we deal with on a day-to-day basis that make us who we are and that sometimes we have to get on the couch and talk out.
Nate Parker
#44. Overhead the sky was dull and cloudless, a bland impassive blue, more the interior ceiling of some deep irrevocable psychosis than the storm-filled celestial sphere he had known during the previous days.
J.G. Ballard
#45. He seems to me to be headed for his ideal fate, which is compulsive psychosis dashed with a jigger of psychopathic irresponsibility and violence
Jack Kerouac
#47. A word a day keeps the psychosis away!
Carol Robi
#48. Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders.
Kimberly McCreight
#49. I felt audiences are happier to take comedy people who play darker people because there's a link between the psychosis of comedy and the psychosis of being a twisted character.
Eddie Izzard
#50. I do not know why we are indulging in a fit of psychosis right now, but so help me, I will throw your crackbrained ass out the window if you don't stop right there.
Thea Harrison
#51. What she needs, at least one thing she needs, is companionship. After all why should she eat? Who needs her to be alive? What we call psychosis is sometimes simply realism. But human beings can't live on realism alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#52. We need to ask whether, in the long term, some individuals with a history of psychosis may do better off medication.
Thomas R. Insel
#53. Our country is now geared to an arms economy bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and an incessant propaganda of fear.
Douglas MacArthur
#54. This guy was a real Pscyho' Mr. Levy said.
'To you character is a psychosis, integrity is a complex. I've heard it all before.
John Kennedy Toole
#55. My interest in the psychological roots of psychosis has both personal (my brother Andrew committed suicide) and professional origins (I was trained in a behaviorist approach to psychology which - whatever its limitations - at least taught me to see human behavior in its social context).
Richard Bentall
#56. Psychosis does not live in the head. It lives in the in-between of family members, and in the in-between of people," Salo explained. "It is in the relationship, and the one who is psychotic makes the bad condition visible. He or she 'wears the symptoms' and has the burden to carry them." (341)
Robert Whitaker
#57. It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear.
Douglas MacArthur
#58. This last possibility [of developing psychosis] is aways present if the individual begins to identify himself too exclusively with that part of him which feels unembodied.
R.D. Laing
#59. Once a restless or frayed mood has turned to anger, or violence, or psychosis, Richard, like most, finds it very difficult to see it as illness, rather than being willful, angry, irrational or simply tiresome.
Kay Redfield Jamison
#60. At the population level, making the world more just and less unequal, while trying to figure out the toxic aspects of the urban environmental will probably help prevent a lot of psychosis.
Richard Bentall
#61. I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.
Neal Shusterman
#62. Psychosis is a gross disturbance in an individual's ability to distinguish self from reality. For schizophrenics, the membrane between imagination and reality is so porous that having an idea and having an experience are not particularly different.
Andrew Solomon
#63. Meditation is to get out of your psychosis and to get out of your neurosis; it is simply to slip out of them.
Rajneesh
#64. Americans are now certifiably insane. They are crazy. They are suffering a mass psychosis. They have lost their own ability to discern right from wrong.
Joseph Farah
#65. I think our collective psychosis is hilarious. With the world moving as fast as it is, if we weren't dysfunctional, we couldn't function.
Christopher Titus
#66. On the way out to Lawrence's, he thought about Palmer's wild reaction. Was there a little fear there? Hard to tell, with all the other possibilities - anger, bigotry, psychosis.
John Sandford
#67. I have a definite psychosis in being with people. I cannot bear it very long.
Patricia Highsmith
#68. Neurosis is the result of a conflict between the ego and its id, whereas psychosis is the analogous outcome of a similar disturbance in the relation between the ego and its environment (outer world).
Sigmund Freud
#69. Insanity is a very lonely and empty existence - it's painfully true. They may laugh and smile, and skip and dance, but behind all the faces there is hollowness like a bottomless pit. The living dead, depression is a terrible illness, so is psychosis, the mentally inflicted beyond cure.
Stephen Richards
#70. This is a serious, serious condition that is also called postpartum psychosis. And that's where, literally, you get so bad that you end up either hurting the baby or killing yourself.
Marie Osmond
#71. Doubt is to certainty as neurosis is to psychosis. The neurotic is in doubt and has fears about persons and things; the psychotic has convictions and makes claims about them. In short, the neurotic has problems, the psychotic has solutions.
Thomas Szasz
#72. When the depressive psychosis has become manifest, its cardinal feature seems to be a mental inhibition which renders a rapport between the patient and the external world more difficult.
Karl Abraham
#73. He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it.
Jeanette Winterson
#74. We're all flawed human beings and we all have a cauldron of psychosis which we have to unravel as we grow older and find the way we fit in to live our lives as best as possible.
Tom Hardy
#75. There was never a time when he thought he was fully himself, and besides, he soon forgot that self and settled into a state of mild and extended psychosis...
Ian McEwan
#76. The delusion that one's sexual pattern is The Only Right Way To Be is probably the single most common sexual-psychosis syndrome of this era, and it is virtually almost always the victim's fault. You cannot acquire this delusion by observing reality.
Spider Robinson
#77. If American literature has a few heroes, Miller is one of them. He refused to name names at the McCarthy hearings, and his play 'The Crucible' analysed the hearings in the context of a previous American mass psychosis, the Salem witch trials.
Jane Smiley
#78. In its extreme form, this fear of losing one's orientation is the fear of psychosis. When persons actually are on the brink of psychosis, they often have an urgent need to seek out some contact with other human beings.
Rollo May
#80. She thinks that if she gives it up, she'll lose the great abilities she believes she's acquired. It's a terrible paradox really: the mind falls in love with psychosis. The evil seduction, I call it. (186)
Michael Greenberg
#81. LSD is known to induce psychosis, in people who have never used it.
Timothy Leary
#82. The sufferings of neurosis and psychosis are for us a schooling in the passions of the soul, just as the beam of the psychoanalytic scales, when we calculate the tilt of its threat to entire communities, provides us with an indication of the deadening of the passions in society.
Jacques Lacan
#83. Why is it that whenever a woman is justifiably upset, the guy always blames it on PMS?"
Please. I've been on the receiving end of Alexandra's premenstrual-induced psychosis often enough to recognize the signs.
Emma Chase
#84. Psychosis is person less persona, raving sincerity.
Brian Spellman
#85. I refer to jet lag as 'jet-psychosis - there's an old saying that the spirit cannot move faster than a camel.
Spalding Gray
#87. I think I know a thing or two about the way people love, but I don't know anything about hatred, psychosis, cruelty. Or maybe I don't have the guts to admit that I do.
Zadie Smith
#88. Belief in a higher power was a form of psychosis.
Claire Merle
#89. Here at CBS, spring also means March Madness. I love the name March Madness. I'm glad the PC police haven't made us change March Madness to early spring psychosis.
Craig Ferguson
#90. He had been diagnosed as suffering from atypical schizophrenia. Lord, how he hated that awful-sounding label. It conjured up visions of some deranged maniac escaped from a secure mental hospital.
Etienne De L'Amour
#91. I found my way home, stripped naked, and lay on the bathroom floor, the cool tiles pushing up. Keeping me from falling. I didn't know how long the floor would hold me. I prayed Ellen would come home ...
Juliann Garey
#92. The irony of taking Anti Depressants: you take them to feel good but they also make you feel bad or worse because you worry about your purse.
Mico Monsalve
#93. We can postulate that there must be diseases founded on a conflict between ego and super-ego. Analysis gives us the right to infer that melancholia is the model of this group, and then we should put in a claim for the name of "narcissistic psychoneuroses" for these disorders.
Sigmund Freud
#94. I dreamt I went to the doctor's and she gave me eight minutes to live-I'd been sitting in the fucking waiting room half an hour.
Sarah Kane
#95. The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
Joseph Campbell
#96. Sometimes I turn around and catch the smell of you and I cannot go on I cannot fucking go on without expressing this terrible so fucking awful physical aching fucking longing I have for you. And I cannot believe that I can feel this for you and you feel nothing. Do you feel nothing?
Sarah Kane
#98. The road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there.
Ernest Becker
#100. Have you made any plans?
Take an overdose, slash my wrists then hang myself.
All those things together?
It couldn't possibly be misconstrued as a cry for help.
Sarah Kane
