Twelve Patients Quotes

“But finally, as Montaigne said, it was useless to "worry about death, it will take care of itself. Worry about life, that needs management.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“If one is intent on revenge, one should dig two graves. One for one’s victim and one for oneself.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“How people die and how we participate in their deaths is as much about us as about them. Our own humanity is at stake. In”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“What you never see as a diagnostic category: the absence of love. Abuse manifesting itself as backache. Neglect resurfacing as chronic, unexplained pain. You have to go to the artists to find the emotional depth I am talking about.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“But another level down we see the effects of self-medication—alcohol abuse, drugs, and often violence in the home. This is harder to talk about, and to treat. Most doctors don’t go near this. “The next layer down reveals a lack of love and intimacy. These go hand in hand with a lack of self-esteem, shame, and a deep sense of humiliation. Humiliation is the well that everything comes from. The anger comes from that humiliation and underlies everything else.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“The push to build prisons and incarcerate blacks and Hispanics for small drug offenses was building momentum. The prison population would swell from under a half a million to five times that number plus tens of millions more under state surveillance as ex-felons.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“How people die and how we participate in their deaths is as much about us as about them. Our own humanity is at stake. In a society that is increasingly mesmerized by efficiency, measurement by numbers and a bottom-line mentality that extols profit and wealth over any other human value, the risk is clear to everyone I work with. When health care is now measured by a “medical loss ratio,” and the percentage of spending on health care is considered a “loss,” then we are really lost.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Where is it written that a good death is bearing gracious witness to the suffering caused by an errant cell that has exploded inside you? Isn’t this meeting other people’s expectations? Isn’t there a time limit, a statute of limitations on expectations? In your final moments, aren’t you free to pursue your own ends by the means you choose?”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Montaigne said, it was useless to “worry about death, it will take care of itself. Worry about life, that needs management.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Why are so many people, with such a wide range of problems, sent to prison as the one-size-fits-all solution?”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Her philosophy was very simple and direct: You loved other people and were loved back. Both were necessary. She was explaining to me how her world worked.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“When kids are subjected to trauma during vulnerable developmental periods that make them children and not mini-adults, they miss the development of emotional control. This emotional dysregulation flows through many childhood disorders. It is almost a universal symptom.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“it was useless to “worry about death, it will take care of itself. Worry about life, that needs management.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“There are certain things we cannot say, not even to ourselves.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“it’s impossible to forgive because even by saying the word we bring back into focus all the harm we’ve done.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“When we start to rationalize mediocrity, then we are condemned to it.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Law & Order veya Nurse Jackie meraklıları için Bellevue sözcüğü, rasgele şiddet eylemler gerçekleştiren psikotik katillerle aynı kapıya çıkar.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“But finally, as Montaigne said, it was useless to “worry about death, it will take care of itself.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Our patients seduced us many times with their modesty and simple graciousness in a sea of suffering.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“For the first time in ten years, we have an honest interpretation of what happened to our family. We understand that while Emily has an anxiety disorder, let’s call it that, and has a very hard time regulating her emotions, a lot of her symptoms are learned. They can be unlearned. She became a grab bag of every imaginable disease. Labels were put on top of labels. She was kidnapped by the system. The medical system and the drug companies. We let her be kidnapped. We are going to get our daughter back. We understand it is going to take time and we have a lot of work to do here. We have to unlearn our reactions, too. We also get that we have been part of the drama. We know we are not innocents.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“Many if not the vast majority of the individuals in the psych unit were subjected to extremities of violence themselves as children. If there is a laboratory experiment in how to create people at the margin of functionality by eliminating all resources and social supports, education, medical care, and community involvement, these are the guinea pigs who have been dumped out of their cages and turned loose on the streets. The prosecuting attorneys lock them up in the city’s penitentiaries, and we treat them for the medical and psychiatric problems that flourish in the hothouse atmosphere of a prison system. In forty years, that system has gone 180 degrees from rehabilitation to punishment, without regard for the long-term self-inflicted collateral damage.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“If one is intent on revenge, one should dig two graves. One for one’s victim and one for oneself”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“We used to leave Santo Domingo to avoid Trujillo and his butchers, now I have to send my son home to avoid the gangs here.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“The mortality from mistakes in the five thousand hospitals around the country is equivalent to a 747 going down every other day.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“This family was a breeder reactor for psychic injury and pain. It would demand more human sacrifice. More lambs to the slaughter. Who would be next? Would it be by drugs, alcohol, cutting, food, emotional distancing, promiscuity, or the intergalactic emptiness that lives at the bottom of lovelessness?”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“This was a man and his wife trying to gain a millimeter toehold on a brutal economic ladder that was created by political and economic forces beyond their control.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“The deep humiliations and desperation of poverty had driven him at age twenty-six to leave his home and family, summed up in the streaks of tears on his face and the muffled sobs.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“one is intent on revenge, one should dig two graves. One for one’s victim and one for oneself.”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“1010 WINS”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital

“numbers and a bottom-line mentality that extols profit and wealth over any other human value, the risk is clear to everyone I work with. When health care is now measured by a “medical loss ratio,” and the percentage of spending on health care is considered a “loss,” then we”
― Eric Manheimer, Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital