A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise Quotes

“I tried to figure out the answer in books. The more books I read, though, the more it became clear that there was no simple answer as to what schizophrenia is, or what causes it. There was, if anything, a charged and polarized disagreement, a complicated one, one I had never known about before.”
― Sandra Allen, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

“In 1978, an activist named Judi Chamberlin published one of the movement's most revered manifestos called 'On Our Own: Patient-Controlled Alternatives to the Mental Health System.' Chamberlin had been diagnosed with a mental illness and found traditional psychiatric intervention unhelpful and even traumatic. She did recover, however, and she credited that recovery to an alternative mental health care facility she stayed at in Canada. Chamberlin and many other madness pride activists believe that people with 'lived experience' should not only have a proverbial seat at the table when it comes to the creation of mental health care systems, but that such people are uniquely equipped to understand what constitutes the best treatment. A slogan Chamberlin sought to make famous was 'Nothing about us without us.”
― Sandra Allen, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

“One of the most studied ideas as to what causes schizophrenia is the 'chemical imbalance theory,' which derives psychiatric pharmaceuticals themselves. Though the 'mechanism of action' of drugs marketed for their 'antipsychotic' properties isn't understood--plainly, drug companies believe these drugs are effective in lessening psychiatric symptoms, but they don't actually know why--what is known is that they affect chemical levels in the brain. It's therefore supposed that abnormal chemical levels might somehow be crucial to understanding what's different about the brains of people diagnosed with schizophrenia. Testing chemical levels inside brains remains impossible. Despite billions of dollars of investigation, the chemical imbalance theory has never been confirmed.”
― Sandra Allen, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

“...I'd learned right away, a psychiatric diagnosis like schizophrenia is a hypothesis. There is no test to prove you have schizophrenia. The best doctor on earth cannot 'see' schizophrenia in your blood, in your hair, in your piss, in your genes.”
― Sandra Allen, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

“This era when everything was working out almost made the last few years feel worth it. Or, rather, had he not been through all that he had, he certainly wouldn't have loved those days as much as he now could.”
― Sandra Allen, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia

“Without the drugs slowing him down, he realized that it was his job to turn his life around, that nobody was going to do it for him, and that he was capable of doing it. And the world, it seemed, was interested in making up for all the shit it'd dealt him these last few years.”
― Sandra Allen, A Kind of Mirraculas Paradise: A True Story About Schizophrenia