Top 90 Susannah Cahalan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To move foward, you have to leave the past behind.”

— Susannah Cahalan

2. “We are all hanging on by a very thin thread, and some of us won’t survive our fall.”

— Susannah Cahalan

3. “We are, in the end, a sum of our parts, and when the body fails, all the virtues we hold dear go with it.”

— Susannah Cahalan

4. “When you think all is lost, the things you need most return unexpectedly.”

— Susannah Cahalan

5. “The anti-psychiatry movement made not-so-strange bedfellows with the civil rights movement. Both were united against a common enemy: the power of “the institution” that decided what was “normal” or “acceptable” in society.”

— Susannah Cahalan

6. “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

7. “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

8. “The healthy brain is a symphony of 100 billion neurons, the actions of each individual brain cell harmonizing into a whole that enables thoughts, movements, memories, or even just a sneeze. But it takes only one dissonant instrument to mar the cohesion of a symphony. When neurons begin to play nonstop, out of tune, and all at once because of disease, trauma, tumor, lack of sleep, or even alcohol withdrawal, the cacophonous result can be a seizure.”

— Susannah Cahalan

9. “Like daffodils in the early days of spring, my neurons were resprouting receptors as the winter of the illness ebbed.”

— Susannah Cahalan

10. “I had asked him many times why he stayed, and he always said the same thing: “Because I love you, and I wanted to, and I knew you were in there.” No matter how damaged I had been, he had loved me enough to still see me somewhere inside.”

— Susannah Cahalan

11. “How many people throughout history suffered from my disease and others like it but went untreated? This question is made more pressing by the knowledge that even though the disease was discovered in 2007, some doctors I spoke to believe that it’s been around at least as long as humanity has.”

— Susannah Cahalan

12. “Too much light has come out of my darkness.”

— Susannah Cahalan

13. “I had lost confidence and a sense of self. Who am I? Am I a person who cowers in fear at the back of a spin class, avoiding everyone’s gaze? This uncertainty about who I am, this confusion over where I truly was in the time line of my illness and recovery, was ultimately the deeper source of the shame. A part of my soul believed that I would never be myself, the carefree, confident Susannah, again.”

— Susannah Cahalan

14. “It just begged the question: If it took so long for one of the best hospitals in the world to get to this step, how many other people were going untreated, diagnosed with a mental illness or condemned to a life in a nursing home or a psychiatric ward?”

— Susannah Cahalan

15. “Perhaps hospitals cure, but psychiatric hospitals don’t. They brutalize, torture: they are outside the pale; they make the sick sicker, and even the sturdiest, sick.” They make the sick sicker.”

— Susannah Cahalan

16. “And then, after years of being dismissed as a soft science, talk therapy, too, has seen a reconsideration as studies have shown that for some people, therapy creates profound changes in the brain – as pronounced, in some cases, as psychiatric medication. “Psychotherapy is a biological treatment, a brain therapy,” said Nobel Prize–winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist Eric Kandel in 2013. “It produces lasting, detectable physical changes.”

— Susannah Cahalan

17. “Just spending more time with the patient can improve outcomes.”

— Susannah Cahalan

18. “Researchers have estimated that as many as a third of people with schizophrenia display some immune dysfunction, though what that means about the underlying cause of the illness remains unclear.”

— Susannah Cahalan

19. “Thomas Moore said: “It is only through mystery and madness that the soul is revealed.”

— Susannah Cahalan

20. “No pseudopatient was unmasked by the staff, yet 30 percent of fellow patients in the first three hospitalizations noticed something was awry, commenting, in one case, “You’re not crazy. You’re a journalist or a professor. You’re checking up on the hospital.”

— Susannah Cahalan

21. “My dad and I had gone off to war, fought in the trenches, and against all odds had come out of it alive and intact. There are few other experiences that can bring two people closer than staring death in the face.”

— Susannah Cahalan

22. “And belief is a pedestal on which great medicine stands.”

— Susannah Cahalan

23. “You have to look backward to see the future.”

— Susannah Cahalan

24. “Because of the nature of my illness, and its effect on my brain, I remember only flashes of actual events, and brief but vivid hallucinations, from the months in which this story takes place. The vast majority of that time remains blank or capriciously hazy.”

— Susannah Cahalan

25. “People with schizophrenia in the United States were better off in the 1970s than they are now.”

— Susannah Cahalan

26. “Psychiatrists like Nancy Andreasen saw this as a step forward for patients who “no longer must carry the burden of blame and guilt because they have become ill.” And that the world should “behave towards a patient just as they would if he had cancer or heart disease.”

— Susannah Cahalan

27. “I am far, far away from here. I am myself again.”

— Susannah Cahalan

28. “Rosenhan’s study ultimately built on this idea, arguing that the healthy volunteers were deemed insane because they were in an insane asylum, not because of any objective, external truths that psychiatry could point to for a diagnosis.”

— Susannah Cahalan

29. “What else had I forgotten? What else would come back, knocking me off balance and reminding me how tenuous my grip on reality was?”

— Susannah Cahalan

30. “Accepted dogma often goes through reappraisals.”

— Susannah Cahalan

31. “To reflect their very real role in healing, some doctors are pushing to rebrand the placebo effect to “contextual healing,” “expectation effects,” or even “empathy responses.”

— Susannah Cahalan

32. “They quoted French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization as proof that psychiatric institutions had, from the very beginning, used confinement as a tool for domination. Sociology professors taught the labeling theory, which presented mental illnesses as self-fulfilling prophecies hoisted upon us by society’s own need to classify and stereotype “deviants.”

— Susannah Cahalan

33. “And then, in February 1969, “David Lurie” walked into the intake room at an unspecified hospital in Pennsylvania and set off a metaphorical bomb. He finally proved what so many people had long suspected: Psychiatry had too much power and didn’t know what the hell to do with it.”

— Susannah Cahalan

34. “Though my behavior was worsening day by day, it was still difficult for her to reconcile the old image that she had of her daughter as trustworthy, hard working, and independent with the new, unpredictable, and dangerous one.”

— Susannah Cahalan

35. “The late neurologist Oliver Sacks agreed, writing in his essay “The Lost Virtues of the Asylum” that “we forgot the benign aspects of asylums, or perhaps we felt we could no longer afford to pay for them: the spaciousness and sense of community, the place for work and play, and for gradual learning of social and vocational skills – a safe haven that state hospitals were well-equipped to provide.”

— Susannah Cahalan

36. “But what you didn’t get with Freud was a focus on diagnosis. In fact, his followers practiced “extreme diagnostic nihilism.”

— Susannah Cahalan

37. “Thomas Szasz called mental illness a “myth” and said that the concept of mental illness was “scientifically worthless and socially harmful.” The opening of his most famous book, The Myth of Mental Illness, reads, “There is no such thing as mental illness,” and the book relegates psychiatry to the realm of alchemy and astrology.”

— Susannah Cahalan

38. “Dr. Balice-Gordon believes that a percentage, albeit a small one, of those diagnosed with autism and schizophrenia might in fact have an autoimmune disease.”

— Susannah Cahalan

39. “The existence of forgetting has never been proved: we only know that some things do not come to our mind when we want them to. – FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE B.”

— Susannah Cahalan

40. “I felt less de-individualized, more actualized in the hospital with those patients than I did as a graduate student, honestly,” he said.”

— Susannah Cahalan

41. “People with schizophrenia in the United States were better off in the 1970s than they are now. And this is really something that all of us in the United States are responsible for.”

— Susannah Cahalan

42. “The book, as one psychiatrist put it, “gave life to a basic distrust of the way in which psychiatry was being used for society’s purposes, rather than the purposes of the people who had mental illness.”

— Susannah Cahalan

43. “Yale researchers found that a key difference in the hallucinatory experiences of psychics and of people with schizophrenia was that the psychics placed the voices in the context of a spiritual or religious experience, and were less disturbed by them.”

— Susannah Cahalan

44. “I may be gone, but I’m not forgotten.”

— Susannah Cahalan

45. “A two-year government-funded study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry has shown that early intervention after “first breaks” – or the first time experiencing the profound symptoms of serious mental illness – involving antipsychotic medication management combined with a “comprehensive, multi-element approach,” which includes family support and psychotherapy, created the best outcomes.”

— Susannah Cahalan

46. “We don’t really know how everyday drugs like Tylenol work, nor do we really know what exactly happens in the brain during anesthesia, even though 250 million people go under every year.”

— Susannah Cahalan

47. “Their organ of study is the “mind,” the seat of personality, identity, and selfhood, so it should not be surprising that the study of it is more impenetrable than understanding, say, the biology of skin cancer or the mechanics of heart disease.”

— Susannah Cahalan

48. “Rosenhan was interested in diagnosis, and that’s fine, but you’ve got to respect and accept the data, even if the data are not supportive of your preconceptions.”

— Susannah Cahalan

49. “Deborah quotes her husband: “I haven’t heard anything, seen anything, touched anything, smelled anything. It’s like being dead.”

— Susannah Cahalan

50. “Just three years marks the demarcation between a full life and a half existence in an institution or, even worse, an early ending under the cold, hard tombstone.”

— Susannah Cahalan