The Great Pretender Quotes

“But once you’ve come face-to-face with real madness and returned, once you’ve found yourself to be a bridge between the two worlds, you can never turn your back again.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“You have to look backward to see the future.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“A psychiatric label has a life and an influence of its own.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Psychiatric epidemiologists are also finding that people born in winter months—during times of heightened flu and viral infections—may be more likely to develop serious mental illness (though people with more severe forms of the illnesses are more likely to be born in the summer months, so who knows).”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“One develops a camaraderie of the afflicted, the cursed, and one’s good fortunes feel like misfortunes.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Emotions are not mathematical formulas, inserted as x + y = psychiatric diagnosis.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Psychiatry makes judgments about people—about our personalities, our beliefs, our morality. It is a mirror held up to the society in which it is practiced.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“we’re never all one way, that insane people are never always crazy, nor are sane people always rational.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Every word counts, every glance counts, every touch counts. The five milligrams of a good medicine is very important, but it’s more effective if you take it in the context of being aware that the healer, the doctor, the nurse, the physical therapist, also have an effect on the patient.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, is as mysterious and soulful as it is scientific.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“The issue with reliability is that consensus does not necessarily translate to legitimacy.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Abnormal psychology is a painfully complicated psychological area. It implicates biology, chemistry and genetics heavily. It implicates social perception. And it implicates the experience of any of us who has been depressed, anxious, or worse. The need to bring simplicity and understanding to an apparently complicated area challenges me.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“tell the sane from the insane. “The facts of the matter are that we have known for a long time that diagnoses are often not useful or reliable, but we have nevertheless continued to use them. We now know that we cannot distinguish insanity from sanity.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“In fact, psychiatrists expanded the scope of social deviance, pathologizing almost everyone in the process, effectively closing the chasm between sanity and insanity by showing that “true mental health was an illusion,”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“The people who needed help the most were left behind as analysts comfortably cherry-picked their patients—mostly wealthy, white, and not very sick.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Medicine, whether we like to admit it or not, frequently operates more on faith than certainty.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“The history of psychiatry is a minefield.” Reader: Beware of shrapnel.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Blackwell Island was supposed to have been different. Built as a “beacon for all the world,” it was located on 147 acres in the middle of the East River and was meant to embody the theory of moral treatment that Dix had championed. Its central tenets came from French physician Philippe Pinel, who is credited with breaking his charges free of their chains (literally) and instating a more humanistic approach to treating madness—though his legacy, historians suggest, comes more from myth than reality. “The mentally sick, far from being guilty people deserving of punishment, are sick people whose miserable state deserves all the consideration that is due to suffering humanity,” Pinel said.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“In the mid-1800s, American activist Dorothea Dix deployed her sizable inheritance to devote herself to these issues with a fierceness of purpose that hasn’t been matched since. She traveled more than thirty thousand miles across America in three years to reveal the brutalities wrought upon the mentally ill, describing “the saddest picture of human suffering and degradation,” a woman tearing off her own skin, a man forced to live in an animal stall, a woman confined to a belowground cage with no access to light, and people chained in place for years. Clearly, the American system hadn’t improved much on Europe’s old “familial” treatments. Dix, a tireless advocate, called upon the Massachusetts legislature to take on the “sacred cause” of caring for the mentally unwell during a time when women were unwelcome in politics. Her efforts helped found thirty-two new therapeutic asylums on the philosophy of moral treatment. Dorothea Dix died in 1887, the same year that our brave Nellie Bly went undercover on Blackwell Island, in essence continuing Dix’s legacy by exposing how little had truly changed.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“crazy people didn’t act crazy all the time; that there was a continuum of behavior that ran from “normal” to “abnormal” within all of us. We all slide around it at various times in our lives, and context often shapes the way we interpret these behaviors.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“I think for a lot of people who are labeled psychotic, if you keep them out of the area that their psychosis is focused on, they can seem normal.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“He believed that madness should be taken seriously, probed, embraced, and examined as a path to insight. He saw Esalen as a place to “live through experience” and facilitated this approach by providing treatments like encounter therapy, bodywork (massage, Rolfing, and sensory awareness), and psychedelic drugs.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“You’ve got to cooperate if you want to get out. Just cooperate. Don’t assert your will.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Once words like mental patient or schizophrenic are affixed to you, there is little you can do or say that can make them disappear, especially when anything that doesn’t support the doctor’s conclusion is discarded for evidence that does.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“His Talmudic cadence—the way he elongated words, pausing and stressing them for dramatic effect—must have been carved in him during a youth spent singing and training to be a cantor. It was the kind of voice that projected authority and made you want to lean in, focus, and listen.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“Yet the minute the doctors discovered my issues were neurological—after I had spent weeks living with a psychiatric diagnosis—the quality of care improved. Sympathy and understanding replaced the largely distant attitude that had defined my treatment, as if a mental illness were my fault, whereas a physical illness was something unearned, something “real.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“How many patients might be ‘sane’ outside the psychiatric hospital but seem insane in it—not because craziness resides in them, as it were, but because they are responding to a bizarre setting?”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“How many fallacies about the mind and brain have we all just been taking for granted? Where did the divide lie between brain illness and mental illness, and why do we try to differentiate between them at all? Have we been looking at mental illness all wrong?”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“No amount of fact-gathering could arm me against this truth: We are all hanging on by a very thin thread, and some of us won’t survive our fall.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness

“psychiatry is different from other medicine in crucial aspects: No other discipline can force treatment, nor hold people against their will.”
― Susannah Cahalan, The Great Pretender: The Undercover Mission That Changed Our Understanding of Madness