Healing Quotes

“Ubuntu is a South African word that means roughly “I am, because of you.” The concept of ubuntu captures both a personal meaning of connection, manifested by warmth and generosity, and a political meaning, represented by inclusion and equity. President Obama spoke to both meanings at the 2013 memorial for Nelson Mandela. “There is a word in South Africa—ubuntu—a word that captures Mandela’s greatest gift: his recognition that we are all bound together in ways that are invisible to the eye; that there is a oneness to humanity; that we achieve ourselves by sharing ourselves with others, and caring for those around us.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“But the larger point is that people with mental illness are missing out on a century of medical progress that has extended life expectancy for Americans from fifty-five to nearly eighty years. In other words, in terms of life expectancy, these Americans are living in the early 1920s.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“For a psychiatrist who holds the keys to this “kingdom of the sick,” there is rarely comfort about committing a patient to care that they refuse. Yes, the near-term gain is clear, because treatments can control the symptoms and prevent a suicide. But the long-term gain is less clear. The gifted therapist Marsha Linehan, who was one of my advisors at NIMH, used to say that there is nothing worse that hospitalizing a suicidal patient. “When you commit a patient, you are saying they are hopeless. You are saying, ‘I can’t help you.’ A suicidal person does not need a locked unit. He needs a reason to live.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“But what gets lost in the discussion about discrimination and negative attitudes about treatment and even civil rights is the complicated experience of having a mental illness. Whereas cancer patients will fight to get care, people with psychosis will fight to resist it. This resistance is in part about the side effects of medications or the indignity of hospitalization, but also in many cases because the irrationality of psychosis confers a kind of cognitive blindness, complete with a paranoid certainty that everyone else is missing the truth.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Writing a novel is like driving across country, at night. You just follow the headlights and somehow get to the other side.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Three of the top risk groups could not look more different: white men over sixty-five, Native Americans, and LGBT adolescents. Each group has at least a fourfold increase in risk, which means that the risk is nearly in the range of those with mental illness”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Medical care saves lives. But it is not the lack of medical care that causes illnesses in the first place. Inequalities in health arise from inequalities in society.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Do these customs and concepts that create a social fabric actually make a difference? Studies of social capital, a measure of the social fabric of a neighborhood, show the importance of connection for health. The scientific evidence for a positive role for social support emerges also from long-term studies of adult development.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“In traditional Japan, the moai is a social support network for unrelated individuals who share a common purpose. The original concept was to create a common fund to support a shared need. But the moai evolved to be more of a social collective, creating a sense of solidarity. Dan Buettner, in his work on the “blue zones,” where people live longer, cites the moai in Okinawa as an example of how social connection increases longevity.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“The passeggiata in small Italian towns is a time when people stroll together through the town square each evening after work, before retiring for the family dinner.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“He describes how individuals and nations cope with loneliness, including how the UK, recognizing the health importance of connection, created a Minister for Loneliness. The need is unambiguous.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“The research is compelling: social isolation can be devastating; social attachment can be curative.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Without my mom, without family support, I know I would have ended up in jail. But I was so lucky. I got involved helping the jail diversion program that Judge Leifman runs here in Dade County. I helped other people get disability benefits. It was the only way I could make sense of this experience, this suffering. Work, serving others, that was my path to recovery.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“But a failure to intervene when someone is an imminent danger is a misread of the power of mental illness and a failure to support the nonpsychotic part of the person.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“But what gets lost in the discussion about discrimination and negative attitudes about treatment and even civil rights is the complicated experience of having a mental illness. Whereas cancer patients will fight to get care, people with psychosis will fight to resist it. This resistance is in part about the side effects of medications or the indignity of hospitalization, but also in many cases because the irrationality of psychosis confers a kind of cognitive blindness, complete with a paranoid certainty that everyone else is missing the truth.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Here was a disease that robbed the patient of the very skills they were being asked to use to coordinate their own care.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Perhaps even more important, most of these resources are for acute care and are not focused on long-term recovery. We have at best a sick-care system geared to crisis, not a health care system designed for recovery.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“This population-based survey found that 14.4 percent of adults (35 million) and 14.7 percent of adolescents (3.6 million) were in mental health care.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“People with mental illness end up incarcerated, homeless, and suicidal because we are no longer committed to people, place, and purpose for all of us. They have become the untouchables, easy to ignore until “they” become a loved one, a neighbor, or a coworker. There may be no group more disenfranchised, more mistreated in our society.”
― Thomas Insel MD, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“A homeless woman who rejected care for two and a half years by screaming at the outreach team when they approached was finally committed for involuntary treatment when she became threatening. Three years later, O’Connell saw her at a board meeting of a nonprofit organization. Finding her totally transformed, O’Connell remarked, “You look fabulous.” Her response, “Screw you. You left me out there for all those years and didn’t help.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“homeless woman who rejected care for two and a half years by screaming at the outreach team when they approached was finally committed for involuntary treatment when she became threatening. Three years later, O’Connell saw her at a board meeting of a nonprofit organization. Finding her totally transformed, O’Connell remarked, “You look fabulous.” Her response, “Screw you. You left me out there for all those years and didn’t help.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“The heritability of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia surpassed the heritability of cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. In identical twins who share all their DNA, the concordance of schizophrenia is 50 percent, fifty times higher than the general population and ten times higher than nonidentical twins. How could genomics fail to identify individual risk or subtypes? Surely DNA sequences could help us cut nature at the joints.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Not only are there nearly three times more suicides than homicides each year, but suicide as a cause of medical mortality surpasses breast cancer, prostate cancer, and AIDS. At least two thirds, some would say 90 percent, of suicides result from depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or one of the other categories of mental illness.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health

“Mental illnesses are, in fact, major killers, not by homicide but by suicide. There are over 47,000 suicide deaths in the U.S. each year, the equivalent of a mass shooting of 129 people each day, every day. That is a suicide every 11 minutes.”
― Thomas Insel, Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health