psychiatry

I was thinking of my patients, and how the worst moment for them was when they discovered they were masters of their own fate. It was not a matter of bad or good luck. When they could no longer blame fate, they were in despair.

It has been written: To the cynic the body is no more than a tenement of clay. To the poet, a palace of the soul. To the physician, an all too ailing hulk. The psychiatrist sees it as a housing for the mind and personality. The geneticist sees it as a perpetuation of its own kind. The biologist sees it as an organism which can alter the future as a result of the experience of the past. The anthropologist sees it as an accumulation of culture. Others have viewed the body as essentially just a machine, a concept that sometimes appeals and sometimes appalls. The English satirist Samuel Butler dismissed his fellow men as but "a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stew pan and the whole thing fixed upon stilts." But to the more reverent, the bodily mechanism is a masterpiece of precise planning-a delicate and complex apparatus whose various components work as a unit to achieve such diverse feats as scaling a mountain top, building a bridge or composing a symphony.

A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

I always say shopping is cheaper than a psychiatrist.

"Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined."

One should only see a psychiatrist out of boredom.

But this does not exempt the sane from a feeling of alarm when a madman who has composed a sublime poem, after explaining to them in the most logical fashion that he has been shut up by mistake through his wife's machinations, imploring them to intercede for him with the governor of the asylum, complaining of the promiscuous company that is forced upon him, concludes as follows: "You see that man in the courtyard, who I'm obliged to put up with; he thinks he's Jesus Christ. That should give you an idea of the sort of lunatics I've been shut up with: he can't be Jesus Christ, because I'm Jesus Christ!" A moment earlier, you were on the point of going to assure the psychiatrist that a mistake had been made. On hearing these words, even if you bear in mind the admirable poem at which this same man is working every day, you shrink from him. . . .

A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing.

One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Anybody who is happy all the time needs a psychiatrist.