Some interesting quotations ( Part 3)

You might find some (or all) of the following quotes interesting:

“… massive amounts of time and energy are spent defining the scope of clinical practice and standardizing service delivery. Despite our best intentions … rules ultimately replace our client’s reality. Defining their problems, and regulating the methods used to treat them, trumps what clients want and how best to achieve it.” Dr. Scott Miller, Beyond Best Practice: How Mental Health Services Can Be Better.

“We know more about what makes a good habitat for mountain gorillas than we do about living in our own cities.” Jan Gehl, Danish architect, Europe’s first Urban Psychology Summit heralded great success.

“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head … It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. And then he feels that perhaps there isn’t.” A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh.

“For twelve years I ran a benzodiazepine withdrawal clinic for people wanting to come off their tranquillisers and sleeping pills. Much of what I know about this subject was taught to me by those brave and long-suffering men and women … It is interesting that the patients themselves, and not the medical profession, were the first to realise that long-term use of benzodiazepines [a family of tranquiliser drugs mostly prescribed for anxiety] can cause problems.” Prof. C. Heather Ashton, The Ashton Manual.

“Ultimately everything depends on the quality of the individual, but our fatally short-sighted age thinks only in terms of large numbers and mass organizations…” Carl Jung, The Undiscovered Self

“… those persons who consider themselves prisoners of psychiatry will accept and appreciate an offer of person-centred interaction as a welcome and beneficial refuge from other staff members’ active efforts at changing their perceptions of reality.” Lisbeth Sommerbeck, The Client-Centred Therapist in Psychiatric Contexts.

“I feel like I entered psychiatry to get help for a broken finger and they amputated my arm.” Anna King

“People don’t necessarily find it helpful to a have a biogenetic explanation – it lends itself to fatalism, which works against the therapeutic alliance and hope. It also raises false expectations that we can intervene at a genetic level”. Dr. Camilla Kong, Senior Researcher specialising in psychiatric genomics at the University of Oxford.

“Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.” Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.

You can find some additional interesting quotations here and also here.