Top 90 Susannah Cahalan Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The history of psychiatry is a minefield.” Reader: Beware of shrapnel.”

— Susannah Cahalan

52. “He studied belief perseverance, or the tendency of people to dig in when presented evidence contrary to their convictions. He also coined the term false consensus effect to describe how people often overestimate how common their beliefs are – particularly dangerous in those who hold extremist views.”

— Susannah Cahalan

53. “The issue with reliability is that consensus does not necessarily translate to legitimacy.”

— Susannah Cahalan

54. “Which was scarier: using psychiatric labels as a tool of oppression, or the possibility that many of these Soviet psychiatrists actually believed that someone who didn’t support Communism must be crazy?”

— Susannah Cahalan

55. “Later that next night, I had an epiphany. Forget bipolar disorder: it was the antiseizure medication Keppra. The Keppra must be causing my insomnia, forgetfulness, anxiety, hostility, moodiness, numbness, loss of appetite. It didn’t matter that I had been on the drug for only twenty-four hours. It was all the Keppra. An Internet search proved it. These were all side effects of that toxic drug.”

— Susannah Cahalan

56. “There are too few psych beds for too many bodies. Only extreme cases – like a woman who bit off her own finger because the voices told her to – get quick care. “This is the sad part of this work. People so psychotic they can’t even get to the hospital without doing something terrible to themselves.”

— Susannah Cahalan

57. “Dr. Najjar, for one, is taking the link between autoimmune diseases and mental illnesses one step further: through his cutting-edge research, he posits that some forms of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression are actually caused by inflammatory conditions in the brain. Dr.”

— Susannah Cahalan

58. “Madness need not be all breakdown. It may be breakthrough.” Students.”

— Susannah Cahalan

59. “Unlike Nellie Bly and others before and after, David Rosenhan’s data was, at last, unimpeachable.”

— Susannah Cahalan

60. “According to a now infamous 1962 Midtown Manhattan study based on two-hour interviews with sixteen hundred people in the heart of the city, only 5 percent of the population were deemed mentally “well.” The whole world was suddenly crazy, and psychiatrists were their caped crusaders.”

— Susannah Cahalan

61. “You can even augment the effects of a placebo with a caring, supportive environment, where the patient not only believes in the drug, but also believes in the doctor.”

— Susannah Cahalan

62. “Stephen was alluring in that languid, stay-out-all-night kind of way: a musician with long, unkempt hair, a skinny smoker’s frame, and an encyclopedic knowledge of music. But his eyes, trusting and honest, have always been his most attractive trait. Those eyes, with nothing to hide, made me feel as if I had dated him forever.”

— Susannah Cahalan

63. “Just because it seems like schizophrenia doesn’t mean that it is,′ Dr. Najjar told me. ‘We have to keep humble and keep our eyes open.”

— Susannah Cahalan

64. “No matter how little proof was there, psychiatry fully embraced the illness model – also known as the field’s remedicalization.”

— Susannah Cahalan

65. “I like to believe what Friedrich Nietzsche said: “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.”

— Susannah Cahalan

66. “Sometimes, Just when we need them, life wraps metaphors up in little bows for us. When you think all is lost, the things you need the most return unexpectedly.”

— Susannah Cahalan

67. “A careful examination of the study’s methods, results and conclusions leads me to a diagnosis of ’logic in remission.”

— Susannah Cahalan

68. “I saw a storminess in her heavily lidded eyes, but a deadness also that jolted me into the past.”

— Susannah Cahalan

69. “Parkinson’s patients will release dopamine, sometimes even enough to control their involuntary movements, when they believe they’re getting real L-Dopa drug treatments.”

— Susannah Cahalan

70. “No other discipline can force treatment, nor hold people against their will. No other field contends so regularly with a condition like anosognosia, whereby someone who is sick does not know it, requiring physicians to make difficult decisions about how and when to intervene. Psychiatry makes judgments about people – about our personalities, our beliefs, our morality.”

— Susannah Cahalan

71. “Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical powers even today,” Freud wrote in 1920. “Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words in psychotherapy.”

— Susannah Cahalan

72. “The brain is a monstrous, beautiful mess.”

— Susannah Cahalan

73. “Many research psychiatrists I’ve interviewed liken DSM diagnoses to our understanding of headaches – we have symptoms with no knowledge of the underlying cause.”

— Susannah Cahalan

74. “Medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, is as mysterious and soulful as it is scientific.”

— Susannah Cahalan

75. “Patients are often taken by ambulance to emergency rooms, where they are boarded in general hospitals that lack psychiatric care.”

— Susannah Cahalan

76. “The government policies that closed these institutions did not embed people more deeply into the community – they pushed them further outside onto our streets and into our homeless shelters, even, as we’ll see, into our prisons.”

— Susannah Cahalan

77. “To understand how this physical organ gives rise to the phenomenon of consciousness, of emotion, of motivation, all the complex functions we humans see as possibly distinguishing us from other animals.”

— Susannah Cahalan

78. “Medicine, whether we like to admit it or not, frequently operates more on faith than certainty.”

— Susannah Cahalan

79. “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

80. “It’s telling that the more we open our eyes to what we don’t know, the more excitement builds in the research community. Emerging studies exploring the link between the immune system and the brain – as is the case for autoimmune encephalitis – have galvanized the quest to understand how thoroughly the body itself influences and alters behavior, spurring studies of immune-suppressing drugs on people with serious mental illnesses.”

— Susannah Cahalan

81. “Two psychiatrists on the same side of the Atlantic, studies showed, agreed on diagnosis less than 50 percent of the time – worse than blackjack odds.”

— Susannah Cahalan

82. “Instead, Rosenhan did what so many doctors do to their patients in the face of complexity – he discarded any evidence that didn’t support his conclusion. And we’re all worse off because of it. The.”

— Susannah Cahalan

83. “Institutional psychiatry in particular was an instrument of oppression to control troublesome or morally deviant characters, whom he called “parasites.”

— Susannah Cahalan

84. “The brain is a physical organ and physical disease occurs within the brain. Why does that make it a ‘psychiatric condition’ instead of a physical ‘disease’?” he wrote. “What am I missing?” He.”

— Susannah Cahalan

85. “An interest in the connection between the gut and the brain has led to some fascinating research on probiotics, which have been shown to reduce mania and some of the more robust symptoms of schizophrenia.”

— Susannah Cahalan

86. “A string of multicolored Christmas lights roped around the length of the yard, and Ryan Adams played in the background.”

— Susannah Cahalan

87. “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

88. “They were determined to create a psychiatry that looked more like the rest of medicine, in which patients were understood to have diseases and in which doctors identified the diseases and then targeted them by treating the body, just as medicine identified and treated cardiac illness, thyroiditis, and diabetes,” wrote Tanya Marie Luhrmann in Of Two Minds.”

— Susannah Cahalan

89. “Yet even as the hospitals were being closed, psychiatry’s reach was spreading wide outside the asylum, like ground ivy, into Hollywood, government, education, child-rearing, politics, and big business, enjoying a sudden social cachet while turning its back on the people who needed help the most – the seriously mentally ill.”

— Susannah Cahalan

90. “In it they argue persuasively for a new model of care that takes the best of the past and adapts it to a modern medical setting. No one can improve without the bare minimum – shelter, clothing, and food – but they also need care: intelligent medical intervention, personal contact, community, and meaning.”

— Susannah Cahalan

91. “Two million Americans had dropped acid by 1970, getting a glimpse of the “other side” and joining the “revolution by consciousness” – convinced, as Joan Didion wrote, “that truth lies on the far side of madness.”

— Susannah Cahalan

92. “The largest concentrations of the seriously mentally ill reside in Los Angeles County, New York’s Rikers Island, and Chicago’s Cook County – jails that are in many ways now de facto asylums. As someone.”

— Susannah Cahalan

93. “There seemed to be no buffer between what I was feeling and how I appeared.”

— Susannah Cahalan

94. “One develops a camaraderie of the afflicted, the cursed, and one’s good fortunes feel like misfortunes.”

— Susannah Cahalan

95. “A psychiatric label has a life and an influence of its own.”

— Susannah Cahalan