Top 60 Robert Kolker Quotes (2024 Update)

2. “But there is another model for progress – the opposite of the polio model – one in which solutions are not the same as breakthroughs. Progress comes gradually, often painfully, in fits and starts, and only after many people spend their entire careers failing and quarreling and, finally, reconciling. Sooner or later, some ideas fall away as others take hold. And, perhaps only in hindsight, we can see how far we’ve come, and decide on a path forward.”

— Robert Kolker

3. “Life is merely the permanent roots your family knots around you.”

— Robert Kolker

4. “As she walked through the door of the house at Hidden Valley Road, she couldn’t help but recognize a perfect sample. This could be the most mentally ill family in America.”

— Robert Kolker

5. “We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us – the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.”

— Robert Kolker

6. “They taught me to embrace the cards you are dealt or it will eat you alive. If you go to the heart of your own matter, you will find only by loving and helping do you have peace from your own trauma.”

— Robert Kolker

7. “In 1948, Chestnut Lodge admitted a teenage girl named Joanne Greenberg, who would go on to bring Fromm-Reichmann a measure of immortality. Greenberg’s 1964 best-seller, I Never Promised You a Rose Garden – a fictionalized memoir, she later called it – was the story of a teenage girl named Deborah Blau who is trapped in the delusional kingdom of Yr. Deborah believes herself to be possessed by an outside force, much the way Daniel Paul Schreber felt that he had been, a half century earlier.”

— Robert Kolker

8. “Practically every drug prescribed for psychosis, from Donald’s time until now, has been a variation on Thorazine or clozapine. Thorazine and its successors became known as “typical” neuroleptic drugs, while clozapine and its heirs were “atypical,” the Pepsi to Thorazine’s Coke.”

— Robert Kolker

9. “Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.”

— Robert Kolker

10. “When asked about his marital status, he said, “I divorced the United States.”

— Robert Kolker

11. “The National Institute of Mental Health spends only $4.3 million on fetal prevention research, all of it for studies in mice, from its yearly $1.4 billion budget,” Freedman noted recently. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”

— Robert Kolker

12. “Biology is destiny, to a point. We are more than just our genes. We are in some way a product of the people that surround us, the people we are forced to grow up with and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us. We are human because the people around us make us human.”

— Robert Kolker

13. “Children, Silvern explained, rely on the adults around them to interpret what’s happening to them. They use their parents’ constructed systems: This is good and that is bad; this person is untrustworthy, and that person is somebody you can count on. Shame and guilt are ways that children usually process those traumas when the grown-ups around them have failed them.”

— Robert Kolker

14. “To be a member of the Galvin family is to never stop tripping on land mines of family history, buried in odd places, stashed away out of shame.”

— Robert Kolker

15. “I’ll work myself to the bone and not ask for help,” Lindsay said, “and then I’ll be resentful.”

— Robert Kolker

16. “We are human because the people around us make us human.”

— Robert Kolker

17. “For a family, schizophrenia is, primarily, a felt experience, as if the foundation of the family is permanently tilted in the direction of the sick family member. Even if just one child has schizophrenia, everything about the internal logic of that family changes.”

— Robert Kolker

18. “At the heart of Jung’s objection was the question of the nature of delusional mental illness: Is schizophrenia something you’re born with, a physical affliction of the brain? Or is it acquired in life, after one has become scarred somehow by the world?”

— Robert Kolker

19. “But Lindsay understood now how we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us – the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later.”

— Robert Kolker

20. “They will see what we call ‘schizophrenia’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”

— Robert Kolker

21. “For decades, doctors have been treating schizophrenia pharmacologically without a clear understanding of the biology of the illness.”

— Robert Kolker

22. “Our culture looks at diseases as problems to solve. We imagine every ailment to be like polio: hopelessly incurable, until a miracle drug comes along that can wipe it off the face of the earth.”

— Robert Kolker

23. “There is no way of knowing how life might have been different for the Galvin brothers if the culture of mental illness had been less rigid, less inclined to cut people off from mainstream society, more proactive about intervening when warning signs first appeared. But there is, perhaps, reason to hope that for people like the Galvins born fifty years from now, things could be different, even transformed.”

— Robert Kolker

24. “Schizophrenia, he concluded, simply can’t be imposed or inflicted on someone who is not genetically predisposed to develop the condition. Rosenthal thought.”

— Robert Kolker

25. “At the end of the conversation, Lindsay posed a question to her sister: Were they willing to accept each other for who they were? Or were they going to continue down the path of thinking the other person was somehow damaged, and impossible to be close with? After.”

— Robert Kolker

26. “It was “mainly” this sort of mother, she wrote, who was responsible for the “severe early warp and rejection” that rendered a schizophrenia patient “painfully distrustful and resentful of other people.”

— Robert Kolker

27. “It’s the way of scientific progress – if you aren’t among the rare few who are immortalized, you are merely part of the great procession of research, a player in a larger drama.”

— Robert Kolker

28. “And so I was crushed,” Mimi said. “Because I thought I was such a good mother. I baked a cake and a pie every night. Or at least had Jell-O with whipped cream.”

— Robert Kolker

29. “Yet half of young school shooters have symptoms of developing schizophrenia.”

— Robert Kolker

30. “The metaphor I use is that years ago, clinicians used to look at ‘fever’ as one disease,” said John McGrath, an epidemiologist with Australia’s Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research and one of the world’s authorities on quantifying populations of mentally ill people. “Then they split it into different types of fevers. And then they realized it’s just a nonspecific reaction to various illnesses. Psychosis is just what the brain does when it’s not working very well.”

— Robert Kolker

31. “Mimi was in charge, they both knew that. But even if what her father said went nowhere, it meant something to Mary that he said it. At least he spoke up, making the case for the well children over the sick ones.”

— Robert Kolker

32. “When you don’t find a sense of love and belonging where you are, you go searching for it somewhere else.”

— Robert Kolker

33. “What if the problem with schizophrenia patients wasn’t that they lacked the ability to respond to so much stimuli, but that they lacked the ability not to? What if their brains weren’t overloaded, but lacked inhibition – forced to reckon with everything that was coming their way, every second of every day?”

— Robert Kolker

34. “Here was the real reason, he thought, why big pharma could afford to be fickle about finding new drugs for schizophrenia – why decades come and go without anyone even finding new drug targets. These patients, he realized, can’t advocate for themselves.”

— Robert Kolker

35. “New Beat Books, 2016. Kindle. Sullivan, Harry Stack, and Helen Swick Perry.”

— Robert Kolker

36. “Schizophrenia’s inaccessibility may be the most destructive thing about it – the thing that keeps so many people from connecting to the people with the illness.”

— Robert Kolker

37. “Without the inhibitory interneurons, we would end up processing the same information all over again – wasting time and effort, grinding our gears, becoming disoriented and, perhaps, anxious and paranoid and even delusional.”

— Robert Kolker

38. “What if he could isolate the gene irregularity that caused people to react this way to the double-click test? If he could do that, and if those people were indeed diagnosed with schizophrenia, then he would have proven the existence of a gene related to the illness and opened the door to a genetic remedy.”

— Robert Kolker

39. “The normal brain learns from what it perceives. It doesn’t have to start from zero if it hears the same thing twice. People with schizophrenia, however, couldn’t manage that. In test after test, conducted at Freedman’s lab in Denver, their brains showed two waves of equal size for the two clicks. It was as if they had to react all over again to the second click – even though they had just heard the same click a fraction of a second earlier.”

— Robert Kolker

40. “Beauty surrounded Mimi, even if she was in no mood to see it.”

— Robert Kolker

41. “Gottesman and Shields’s theory became known as the “diathesis-stress hypothesis” – nature, activated by nurture.”

— Robert Kolker

42. “One meta-analysis, published in 2013, found that 7.2 percent of the general population has experienced hallucinations or delusions; another study in 2015 put the figure at 5.8 percent. A third of the people counted in the latter study only had one episode, while others had more persistent symptoms.”

— Robert Kolker

43. “Something was bothering Mimi – and it had to do with her daughters. She knew that in their eyes, she was both the villain and hero of the family: a mother in denial, heartlessly neglecting her daughters because she was so attached to her sick sons, and a mother who kept her family together, left to care for so many sick sons by herself. Mimi sensed she was being judged.”

— Robert Kolker

44. “What would progress look like for schizophrenia? If the Galvin boys had been born a half century later or more – growing up today, let’s say, and not in the 1950s or 1960s – would their treatment be any different now? In some respects, little has changed. The market for new schizophrenia drugs remains sluggish.”

— Robert Kolker

45. “So far, she has learned that the key to understanding schizophrenia is that, despite a century of research, such a key remains elusive.”

— Robert Kolker

46. “She still felt like the youngest – like everything the family went through flowed down to her. Part.”

— Robert Kolker

47. “Making Donald the brunt of their jokes gave them a sense of power over a situation they had no explanation for – and reassured them that whatever Donald was, he was not them.”

— Robert Kolker

48. “Then he started seeing things. First Donald and Jim, then Brian and Peter, now Matt and Joe – six of the twelve of them, lost.”

— Robert Kolker

49. “In 1979, Wyatt’s team published research showing that people with schizophrenia had more cerebrospinal fluid in their brain ventricles – the network of gaps in the tissue of the brain’s limbic system, where the amygdala and hippocampus are located.”

— Robert Kolker

50. “One of the consequenses of surviving schizophrenia for fifty years is that sooner or later, the cure becomes as damaging as the disease.”

— Robert Kolker