Bedlam Quotes

“outgoing White House communications director called a White House chief of staff “a fucking paranoid schizophrenic”?8 “Stigma causes people to feel ashamed for something that is out of their control,” explains Laura Greenstein of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “Worst of all, stigma prevents people from seeking the help they need.” This book”
― Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis

“We are not alone. But we desperately need one another. We need to share our stories. We need comradery and a unified movement. As many of us have found out the hard way, none of us can fix these diseases alone. None of us, rich or poor, can insulate and protect our family members from psychiatric disorders. I’ve met billionaires who are helpless to get their ill children out of jail. I’ve met the most powerful public health officials who have helplessly watched their siblings die on the streets. The richest among us can’t buy medicines that don’t exist; the cleverest person can’t find a bed in a hospital that lies in ruins; the smartest doctor can’t unravel the riddle of these poorly understood brain diseases. We can only solve this together, as an outspoken, unified, undeterred, and unashamed community.”
― Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis

“Dr. Torrey often mentions how the North Carolina mental hospital that reformer Dorothea Dix had founded in 1856 closed in October 2016 and was replaced by a jail on the very same plot of land.”
― Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis

“Another solution would be treatment facilities that people actually want to be in. “Our system is so broken and so uninviting and unwelcoming and feels so unsafe that a lot of people don’t want to engage in care,”
― Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis

“Asylums never went away, they just grew into two varieties: posh for the wealthy (in the form of a handful of fancy $100,000-plus a year mental institutions) and prisons for the poor,”
― Kenneth Paul Rosenberg, Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis